Category: In the Field

A new place to explore! The Land of Enchantment, or (to judge from the snazzy new black license plates) The Land of Red and Green (Chilies).

I debarked (detrained?) in Albuquerque, and scheduled some light touristy activity to get used to the altitude. First order of business was picking up my prepaid rental car at the Hertz office next to the Amtrak station. Except—no Hertz office. One of the train station staff told me, oh, yeah, that building burned down and they never replaced it. We keep telling Hertz to remove it from their listings.

So, after a somewhat tense call to Hertz to book a car at the airport, and a quick ride to same provided by Anthony, I was on my way to my Old Town motel.

After a day of finding all the yummy food and taking a guided tour of Old Town ABQ, I was ready to get out in the field. Sevilleta NWR is two counties south, along the Rio Grande. The loop trail from the visitors center has some very helpful ID markers for some of the desert plants, but that didn’t stop me from misidentifying Rubber Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa): the stuff is everywhere, short and tall. I found two life birds: Ladder-backed Woodpecker (Dryobates scalaris) and Chihuahuan Raven (Corvus cryptoleucus). I got a lucky shot with my long lens and caught one of the birds with white throat feathers ruffling in the wind.

Next day was a disappointment: I rode the Sandia Tramway to the peak, only to figure out that the way to the spot with the bird feeders was a snowy 2-mile hike away from the tram terminal. So no rosy-finches this time. I moved on to my next city, Farmington.

Front desk staff at my Albuquerque motel gave me two great restaurant recommendations: Church Street Cafe (tasty “Q” salad) and Sawmill Market, a food hall with too many good choices. And I found Flying Roadrunner Bakery around the corner from my tour guide’s kiosk. The things they do with blueberries there…

Two field trips for this year’s annual meeting, both of them in the vicinity of Stuarts Draft on the western slope of the Blue Ridge.

Gary Fleming led the walk to several sinkhole ponds in the Maple Flat area of the George Washington/Jefferson National Forest. Limestone/dolostone account for the sinkholes, but unlike the karst landscape of Lee County, here the soft stone is overlaid by alluvium/colluvium and a layer of clay. One of the specialties of this site is Boltonia montana, only recently scientifically described.

Nate Miller was our guide to Cowbane Prairie NAP, a wet meadow. I would have done well to bring my LaCrosse boots. I didn’t get great images of any of the specialties here (and they were not in flower, anyway). The group enjoyed multiple plants of Bottle Gentian (Gentiana clausa). On a goldenrod, a Spotted Cucumber Beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata) made for a nice image, after cropping. It’s probably time for me to start paying more attention to orthopterans.

The Alexandria count in 2023 at Huntley Meadows Park was pretty much washed out. Scouting for this year indicated that there wasn’t much in bloom on the boardwalk side, so I was reassigned to the hike-bike trail side and trip leader Ana. Oh, what a difference! Huge swaths of Bidens, full of skippers, including Ocola Skipper (Panoquina ocola) (new to me this count week) and Fiery Skipper (Hylephila phyleus).

We did take an hour on the boardwalk as well: the highlight of this side was a thistle with a half dozen Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) nectaring on it.

And snakes and spiders and shorebirds and more wildflowers and more butterflies.

Before returning home, I stayed over an extra day to bag one more state park under the Trail Quest program. Pocahontas State Park was rather quiet on a weekday. I rambled on the yellow-marked Forest Exploration trail in my backup car sneakers (as my usual sneakers were still drying out). Pocahontas has a network of trails designated and graded for mountain bikes, but the Forest Exploration trail is designated for foot traffic only. Much of the walking was on sandy substrate, with plentiful bits of isinglass scattered about. Gunfire, alas, from nearby private land was regularly audible. Not too much in bloom, but I found a solitary Indian Tobacco (Lobelia inflata) in flower and fruit.

Genevieve Wall led a two-day foray to several sites along the James River in Richmond and environs. We took a short walk in the area known as Pony Pasture, along the upper reaches of the whitewater that courses through the city. A fine Tawny Emperor (Asterocampa clyton) made an appearance. At a second site downriver, we crossed the humpty-backed footbridge to Belle Isle; the bridge is suspended from the Route 301 bridge.

The next day, now fully in the Coastal Plain, as we waited for the ferry to Presquile National Wildlife Refuge, some of us spotted an Atlantic Sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) breaching. The refuge is now a grownup island, as long ago a channel was cut across the base of its peninsula to facilitate river barge traffic (the Turkey Island Cutoff). Meadows in the refuge are relatively clear of most non-native invasives; however, the management plan calls for letting natural succession to take place, which is expected to clear out the infestation of Clematis terniflora. Heavy morning dew on the mown paths plus poor planning on my part resulted in soggy feet for most of the day. An interesting ode caught our attention, but she turned out to be “just” a Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis). We wrapped up the day with a contemplative paddle in canoes from Deep Bottom Park.

The Grass Bunch met, in scattered fashion, at Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve, after waiting out a passing thundershower. In the past, field trips to Dyke Marsh (say, for birding) have usually petered out at about the point where the trail turns east. but this time, C and I walked the length of the trail, to the end of the boardwalk. There are some pleasant views from this point.


After scooting through the non-natives near the trailhead, we turned up a couple plants in flower that I had not recorded before, Cutleaf Coneflower (Rudbeckia lacinata) and Biennial Beeblossom (Oenothera gaura).