Tag: photo

To break in a new pair of boots, I took an easy loop hike on the blue blazes around the battlefield of First Bull Run. The breezes were strong, and it was midday, but there were a few butterflies flying. I turned up something I didn’t remember from last year—Common Wood Nymph (Cercyonis pegala)—as well as something that turned out to be, upon checking my photos later, an animal I’ve never put on my list before, Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor). I think I’ve probably seen this guy before, but I’ve been put off by one of the photos of the dorsal side in Glassberg’s book. The ID key, it seems, is actually the single row of orange spots on the ventral side of the hindwing.

The bridge over Bull Run was once a prized strategic objective. Now, not even the nesting swallows are interested in it; they prefer the U.S. 29 bridge just downstream.

The trail gets a lot of noise from the roads and a winery just across the run, but it crosses through a lot of woods and can be quite pleasant.

The Carter family cemetery is completely enclosed by a stone wall built from the ruins of Pittsylvania, the manor house. The graves within are not individually marked. The last interment was done in 1903.

One of the simpler assignments for my current class in freshwater ecosystems was to visit the falls of the Northwest Branch (and have a picture taken to prove it).

This reach of the river is wild and urbanized at the same time. The trail is a short stumble down from a parking lot on Colesville Road. This is the site of Burnt Mills (ooh, the Internet Archive has an interesting book from 1931 about the history of the flour mill that was here). The riverborne trash is hard to overlook, and especially around the parking lot, the non-native invasive plants are pretty aggressive. Nevertheless, I found a few bits of Rattlesnake Weed (Hieracium venosum) growing around the rocks. Leta and I scrambled for a couple hundred yards downstream before turning back. I showed her an Acadian Flycatcher making sallies to a pool.

On the other side of Colesville Road, the river is held back by a dam and spillway. On this flat bit of trail, we found two Five-lined Skinks (Eumeces fasciatus): a juvenile with the familiar blue tail and a much-larger adult male with indistinguishable lines, orange-red in the head, and a truncated tail.

Leta chatted with one of the fishermen, who said that sometimes he took bream from the river. I think that we would know these as sunfish.

Today’s report for nesting activity, abridged and annotated:

A much greener park than 5 weeks ago, and most of our boxes have hatched! We have 8 (at least partially) successful nests, and one failed drop/dump nest in box #4. Box #13 was in the process of hatching when we got there; the Wood Duck hen flushed and showed a somewhat unexpected distraction display. We closed up the box quickly and backed off; we will get a shell count next time. Box #84 may also be in the process of hatching. Box #60, hatched out, at right.

In the vicinity of box #62, we had unaided eye views of a male Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotoria citrea), vocalizing “sweet-sweet” and checking out some natural holes in a snag. Of course, this the spot where we’d maintained warbler boxes for a few years–until this season.

We’ll have another work day in June, to count #13 and #84 and two more boxes that haven’t yet hatched. Box #62, still unhatched, at left.

Water gauge reading: 1.64

This beaver-cropped Sweetgum tree reminds me of Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk. A lot.

Our field trip for Jai Cole’s Freshwater Ecosystems class visited the Left Fork of the Paint Branch, on the site of the former Maydale Nature Center. The site is part of the Upper Paint Branch Special Protection Area, and the stream was the target of recently completed restoration work. We focused on the restoration work, and also performed a classroom exercise-level habitat assessment.

The centerpiece of the restoration is this 100-meter reach. You’re looking upstream and roughly northwest, standing on a bridge that provides access to the area. Out of frame to the right is a small parking lot. The point of the project was to replace a series of notched logs that channelled the stream as it drops from a weir (the flat water just visible in the background) (which maintains water supply for a pair of ponds on the property) and flows under the bridge; the problem with the logs was they they weren’t designed to allow fish passage. (Brown Trout is a naturalized breeder in the watershed.) The project replaced the logs with a series of arcing rock structures (called “cross-veins” in the local engineering parlance), each with a gentler drop and a plunge pool downstream. The pools give fish swimming upstream enough elbow room to get up speed to jump and surmount the rock barrier. Notice how the top of each arc of stones drops a few inches at the center: that’s where we want the most water to flow. A vertical plane through a watercourse passes through the point of maximum flow and the deepest part of the channel, which is called the thalweg, and in this case we want the thalweg to remain where it is.

From elsewhere on the stream, here’s a closeup (albeit with a lot of glare) of an arced cross-vein on the right and a straight-line weir on the left. Water flow is right to left, and the weir maintains the pool downstream of the cross-vein. Again, notice that, at this level of flow, the stones of the cross-vein near each bank are high and dry, and the stones in the center have the most flow over them.

Stephanie Mason led another nature hike yesterday, this time at an elevation considerably higher than three weeks ago. We covered about 5 miles along the Appalachian Trail and side trails, from Stony Man to Jewel Hollow.

We got some nice looks at high-elevation tree specialists for our region, like Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), Red Spruce (Picea rubens), and the glossy-barked Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis). Perhaps owing to the higher elevations around Stony Man (4011 feet), the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees in this patch look pretty healthy and untouched by the adelgids.

Closer to the ground, spring ephemerals were abundant—Wild Pink, Moss Phlox, cinquefoil, bluets, many violets, Wood Anemone, waterleaf, Star Chickweed. I picked up one butterfly for my list, Falcate Orangetip (Anthocharis midea). Among the birds, the best was a bird from my “renewal” list of lifers that I haven’t seen in a long time: Veery (Catharus fuscescens). Good, multiple looks at Chestnut-sided Warbler (and we could point them out to a party of passing hikers) and American Redstart.

We climbed about 300 feet, then dropped down and ended about 300 feet below our starting point. We hit Stony Man early enough in the day (before noon) that the traffic was not too bad.

Frogging by ear tips, derived from yesterday’s walk to Calvert Cliffs on the Western Shore of Chesapeake Bay with Stephanie Mason: Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor and H. chrysoscelis) sounds something like the ratchet on a retractable dog leash, while the irregular clicking sound of Cricket Frog (Acris sp.) resembles those annoying magnetic balls that my colleague Dylan likes to play with.

Once again, we saw elvers shimmying their way up Grays Creek. Eels (the young are elvers) are catadromous, that is they migrate downstream from fresh to salt water to breed then die, unlike the better known anadromous migrants (like salmon) that swim upstream to freshwater spawning grounds.

Also in the watercourse, we saw many Water Boatmen (Corixidae) sculling about.

Stephanie calls the 5-inch-long Fence Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus) our local iguana, since it is in the same superfamily as the big guys of the southwest.

Trees were late leafing out (this is one of my favorite local species, Carpinus caroliniana, just opening up), so the birding was good. We heard or saw nearly three dozen species, and found two nests being built by Blue-gray Gnatcatchers (Polioptila caeruluea). The gnatcatchers showed some variety in vocalizations; one colloquy between two birds sounded like a couple of mockingbirds after too much espresso. My good bird was a fairly common species that I just don’t see very often, Yellow-throated Warbler (Dendroica dominica).

Margaret Chatham led a wildflower walk at the Nature Conservancy’s Fraser Preserve for VNPS. Spring Beauty was plenteous, but (as you would expect, given the everlasting winter we had) many bloomers were weeks behind schedule. Margaret showed us one example of Harbinger-of-Spring (Erigenia bulbosa) (very difficult to image properly); Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii) was in various states of opening into flower; some Trout Lilies (Erythronium americanum) in a sheltered wet spot were in flower. But the Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) and Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) really hadn’t gotten started yet.

Down along the pipeline easement, the Poison Hemlock was nothing but basal leaves, nothing at all like the towering plant I saw just 49 weeks ago.

We found some early flying Spring Azure and Mourning Cloak butterflies. I was happy because we found three single Bloodroot blooms (Sanguinaria canadensis), widely scattered—this has been sort of a nemesis plant for me.