More hawk tawk & bobcat ramblin'

Well, my hawk is still doing well, and I'm still trying to "speak" to it when it perches in front of the truck. But last Thursday, it seemed nervous and flighty as a bird. It swooped over me coming home and kept on going, then swooped over me again before the driveway, perching on a nearby tree branch. I stopped the truck and got out. But before I could "say" the first word, it was gone. Very nervous. My hair stood on end on the back of my neck. I took this as a warning to be aware.

The day before, a skinny bobcat loped diagonally across the Highlands-Walhalla Road in front of me. As usual, this predator owns the spaces it occupies, no matter how fast it moves.

Hawk Talk & Rattler Rattle

I've started trying to "talk" to "my hawk," the broadwing that so often swoops around these parts. It curved gracefully up in front of me as I was going back up the hill to the house from the garden one morning (about 10-12 days ago) and perched on a tulip poplar branch.

First, I tried a human version of the high-pitched screech that is this bird's signal. Click on the following to listen:

http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/view_default.asp?sortBy=has+audio&viewType=list&curFamilyID=218

Then, I tried just old-fashioned English, and told it that our friend Honor had recently rescued one of its brethren, when it surfaced dazed and confused on the side of Warwoman Road. Click on the July 10 entry at the following site for rescue details:

http://silvermoonfrog.blogspot.com/

Well, I'm not sure if my hawk heard this talk, but at least it did not fly away right away. I feel that it heard something. Now, I am trying to hear what it has to say to me. This is an interesting exercise for one usually so "linear."

More recently, we find that a good-sized timber rattlesnake has taken up domain under one of our wooden decks, as a worker found out last week. Its high-pitched rattle is distinctive and pressing and puts you on definite alert when you hear it. This rattler is about as thick as a man's forearm. Big. Territorial. Likes to let you know that it is there and not to be too disturbed.

Wonder if he's the same one that, as a juvenile, used to hang out on our pile of two-by-sixes (see post for March 19, 2009.)

That is all for today.

Wondrous Sightings No. 8 -- Broadwing of the Badlands

It swooped so fast in such a graceful curve today that I barely had time to stop the truck before it kissed a nearby white pine branch and then quickly dipped farther into deeper forests. Gone in about two seconds. The curve of its flight, like the sine-cosine dips of a radio wave, is beyond beautiful -- an omen of good.

Wondrous Sightings No. 7

Dear Blog People: I continue to be blessed with sightings of birds of prey, most recently by the baby Broadwing Hawk that plummeted to the side of the road, right in front of the truck, to claw out a little vole, mole or chipmunk. Something small anyway. Where else -- but Warwoman Road. By the time it appeared, this hawk was upright with talons down. Pretty fierce, even for a baby.

Several weeks ago, up in Montana, a bald eagle rose up from the Flathead River and led us along a forest byway for several miles. That is one big, powerful bird!

My mate tells me there is likely to be message in all this -- like what am I going to pounce on next?

Righteous mountains

Fran and I were fortunate to recently get away for a week, to the highlands of Glacier National Park in far-off Montana. This was eye-opening country, vast, open, and very, very big. The top picture is looking north along Lake McDonald toward the "Garden Wall" glacier formation, as is the bottom photo. The picture in the middle is of the wild backcountry, also looking north, past Bowman Lake. This is humbling territory. Go see it before it all melts. National Park Service officials report there are only about 20 glaciers left in this park, compared to the 110-plus identified at the turn of the last century.

Carpet of white

For a brief few days last week, the woods seemed awash with a carpet of white -- a spectacular flowering of dogwoods in bloom.

It is hard to tell without scientific, year-to-year measurement, but the dogwoods appeared more numerous, more vibrant, more colorful and definitely more alive than in recent years. Since the mid 1970s, wild dogwood trees all across the mountains of Southern Appalachia have been dying from a fungal disease called Dogwood Anthracnose (discula destructiva).

But they seem to resist the blight somewhat if they get a lot of sunlight, and there was more sunlight than normally on the hillside below our house this year -- many of the scrub pine trees had fallen to another infestation, the Southern Pine Beetle. The dogwoods took advantage of this cycle of death and rebirth to make for a show of white blooms.

Then, we had five days in a row of heavy rain, the hardwood trees (mostly tulip poplar, oaks, sourwoods, persimmons and red maple) all leafed out at the same time, bringing shade back to our land.

But for a brief few days last week, the woods seemed awash with a carpet of white. It was beautiful.

Not so wondrous

From time to time, I see stuff out in the woods that jars, that does seem quite right.

-- On New Year's Day, Fran and I decided to take a walk down to the river (the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River.) At the Forest Service gate to this location, we found a large, fresh-killed black bear. Several of its claws had been clipped off. This carcass definitely seemed out of place. But the story did not end there: Some days later, someone severed its head off. Then, several days after that, someone burned the entire site. All that was left was part of the bear's rib cage, sticking up out of the charred earth.

-- In early spring, there were reports of avian flu affecting birds in this county. I'm not sure if it was the flu or not, but it was strange to run across a big turkey buzzard hobbling along a country road. It could not fly or get out of the way of the truck.

-- Then, just a few weeks ago, we came across the body of a dead broadwing hawk in an area of national forestland that had recently been crisped under what the agency terms a "prescribed burn." Someone had cut off this hawk's tail feathers, apparently as a souvenir trophy for the broad black-and-white bands that decorate this hawk's tail.