A Second Chance

Nature has a way of correcting Man’s mistakes when Man doesn’t stack the deck against it and throw things out of balance.

A few years ago, my friend in Bernardsville, NJ, decided I needed an orchid. A moth orchid, to be precise, the one you are likely to see for sale in supermarkets, Home Depot and on windowsills or tables in Chinese restaurants.

My friend has been growing orchids for years and has several. She keeps them on a shelf over her sink where the humidity is high and the light through the window behind them is bright but not direct.

Orchids, Duke Farms orchid house, June 2012

They’re easy to grow, she said. You’ll enjoy it.

I know there are people who are obsessed with orchids. Books have been written on the subject.

I am not that person.

I like to think I have a green thumb. I grow flowers and vegetables around the outside of my house, and have had flowering or leafy indoor plants for even longer.

But the orchid was different. My kitchen doesn't have a lot of light and, this plant coming to me in winter, I needed to buy orchid food AND a humidifier.

Worse, the plant wasn’t in soil. The peat it grew in seemed to be wet all the time, even after two weeks without water. (The pot had a plastic liner.)The beautiful flowers lasted over a month and when they dropped off I cut the plant back, as directed.

Instead of the expected new set of flowers on the stem, it grew new leaves. I had helped create a baby orchid.

Then the plant seemed to stop growing altogether.

I thought it had rot and so dumped the peat it was in, trimmed back the roots and put it in a bigger pot with bark.

I nearly killed it.

Orchids LIKE all that moisture. They thrive on it.

When Doris Duke decided to open a small part of her estate to the paying public (including me) to view her exquisite indoor gardens, one of the biggest hits was the orchids. Now, Doris long gone and the battle over her estate (including what to do with the Hillsborough, NJ, property her father - JB Duke of Duke tobacco, Duke Energy and Duke University - built into a huge self-sustaining farm) settled, nearly all the NJ property (except the mansion where Duke lived) is open to the public as a lovely, free park (which is very good for birding, by the way).



The Duke mansion, as reclusive as its owner.
June 2012

 The only part of the old indoor garden kept (but moved to a different part of the estate and into a more energy-efficient greenhouse) is the orchid house. You go in and it is very humid and warm, although not uncomfortably so. The orchids attached to the trees seem to be holding on by the most spindly of roots.

Just like the ones I’d cut back on my orchid, thinking I was helping it.

I am happy to say that despite my mishandling, the orchid stayed green and did not die. I did not give up on it and it did not give up on me.



Hanging on by the most delicate of roots.
Duke Farms, June 2012

 I put it back in its original lined pot and the bark remains wet. I cut off the stem with the baby orchid and put it in a vase. They’ve been out on the back porch since mid-May in the heat and humidity.

I feed both of them and now both appear to be growing again - a new root and leaf on the parent and, incredibly, a tiny root on the baby. When the baby’s root gets big enough I can take the plant off the rotting stem and put it in a small pot of bark and hope it attaches itself and continues to grow.

Maybe they'll even flower again.

A couple of times, before I put them out on the porch, I admit I came close to dumping the orchids into the compost pile.

That might not have been as cruel as it sounds. In early spring I divided two pots of cannas, planted what I wanted and put the rest - dead matter, I thought - into the compost pile. After weeks of rain and warmth and being left alone, I discovered quite a few growing canna plants. I've since pulled them up and planted them elsewhere.

The orchid might have done better - in the compost pile or on my table - had I just left it alone and not messed up nature's balance and nearly killed it.

I’ve been given a second chance so I’ll try to do better.

Ghosts and Greystone

If you walk up Central Avenue, past the homes in Morris Plains, you come to a fork in the road. To the right is Collins Road, a short street with a dog park at the other end.

Greystone now, along Central Avenue

If you continue up Central Ave. you will pass wide expanses of grassy meadow, old trees, several athletic fields and the offices of the ARC and the Interfaith Pantry.
It’s a wide street and a pleasant walk, especially on a sunny day. Many walk or ride their bicycles. Many drive this road as a shortcut to and from Parsippany to points beyond. In the middle of a weekday and you’ll find cars and trucks parked in the shade as people take their breaks, talking on the phone, checking messages, sleeping.

This is now officially Central Park of Morris County, but to me it will always be Greystone.

The park now looks very different from when I first moved to Morris Plains and decided to walk up Central Ave. to the end. I knew what was there. My husband, who grew up in Morris County, had told me about what was once the State Asylum for the Insane at Morristown until the name was changed to the more prosaic Greystone Park.

When I walked Central Ave. past that fork in the road the street was lined with empty, hulking, stone structures, bars still on the upper windows and the first floor boarded to keep people out.

At the end of Central Ave. was the administration building, still in use at the time. I knew the other buildings were deserted, the patients moved to smaller buildings elsewhere on the property, but I still felt as though I was being watched.

Greystone's administration building, one of the ghosts.

What changed was in the 1990s the hospital was so overcrowded and conditions were so horrendous it was ordered shut down and a more state of the art facility built. The state decided to sell what land it didn't need to Morris County for $1 and built the hospital on the western-most edge of the property.
If you walk along Central Ave. now, as I do many days, it is an enjoyable experience, one I’d encourage you to do. The grass is long and filled with wildflowers. Birds - sparrows, mockingbirds, warblers in season - sing from the stately old trees. It is a place of peace.

When you walk you’ll see driveways and lanes that end in grassy fields, where the buildings once stood. Young trees will form a canopy over Central Ave. in a few years. I don’t go to the sporting events but walking around the fields I can tell a lot of work was done to erase those ghosts.

That’s the county property. The property still held by the State of New Jersey and not used for the hospital is very different. At the end of Central Ave. the administration building still looms. Nearby are other structural reminders of the past and decaying roads to them, all festooned with No Trespassing signs.

I do not know what the state plans to do with that land. There was talk - there is always talk in Trenton - that the remaining buildings would be pulled down and the land sold to developers.

At the moment our Republican governor, from Morris County, has said nothing about his intentions toward the property. I would prefer the buildings come down but the fields remain open. You can never get enough open space in New Jersey and there is already too much traffic into my town thanks to several large, recent housing and townhouse developments up the road in neighboring Parsippany.

There have been efforts by some local politicians and private groups to forestall any development while keeping the administration building standing because of its historic value.

But looking up at that building - the parking signs for long-gone officials still up, the lower windows boarded and graffitied, the starlings coming through the broken upper windows - my preference is to pull it down.

It’s too far gone to be useful to anything except the birds and the ghosts.

Update: After the first version of this post, which lacked a headline and this version now replaces, was published on this blog and by the Morris Plains Patch earlier this week I heard from several people, both for and against taking down the administration building. One woman lectured me on "obviously" not knowing the history of the mental institution, which I do know but did not include in the interests of space, and because it wasn't germane to my central point. There are links above that will take you to sites detailing the history, if you are interested. My feeling about bringing the buildings down but leaving the land alone are unchanged, mainly because I don't trust the state of New Jersey in these tough budget times to do anything useful with these deteriorating buildings.

The Scientific Method

This is a picture of my husband as we were walking along a trail one recent winter. I know it wasn't last winter because after the October 30 storm we had no snow until spring.

MH is not a believer in chance. MH prefers to be prepared. Yes, he was a Boy Scout once.

He has more of a scientific bent. When we go birding he walks quickly. I, meanwhile, amble along, dealing with whatever Fate may throw at me.
 
I will stop at the smallest sound in case it's a new bird. He will keep walking. He will stop to photograph a snake, a butterfly or a dragonfly. I usually ignore anything that is not a bird and keep walking.

It is a difference in style and approach. He is more apt to pick up a dusty tome containing records of the earliest and latest a  rosebreasted grosbeak has been seen in New Jersey. He notes records precisely.

He knows that if we're lucky, rosebreasted grosbeaks will show up at our seed feeder in early May, around the time of our anniversary. He has a good idea of when the first junco appears for the winter and when it will leave in the spring.

I tend to stick to the here and now. I go, look and record, check in a bird guide to find out what I am seeing but I have little interest in the past unless I need the information for a precise reason. There are birders who compile lists on Excel spreadsheets. MH has given me books to record my sightings by date and location, but I prefer writing in narrative in a notebook, or in this blog.

Rosebreasted grosbeak

Between the two of us we are an ideal birder, one who has an appreciation for the here and now but who is also aware of the past, which allows us to realize how strange it is that an increasing number of bird types that would never have been considered anything other than a southern species are now much more commonly seen in the north. Redbellied woodpeckers. Carolina wrens. Yellow-throated warblers. Prothonotary warblers.

Birders get excited by this possibility of seeing a new or unusual bird in their familiar birding patches. The other weekend MH and I were birding along Old Mine Road - a popular place for those migrants that nest in elevated, forested land (it is part of Worthington State Forest, parallel to the Delaware River) - and we had stopped to look at a brook falling sharply downhill. I was hearing a hooded warbler - twee-tweeteo - when MH pulled up his camera and started "shooting" at something moving. It was calling and not singing but when it popped up it was most definitely a prothonotary. It is golden yellow and stockier than a yellow warbler and has silver-gray wings. Unfortunately, his pictures of it did not come out or I'd have included one here.

These birds are common in Florida but the first one MH and I ever saw was on a rock in Central Park, where the little guy made a lot of birders very excited. The next time I saw one of these was in the front garden of the New York Public Library, a little bird surrounded by big men with gun-like cameras. (That is where I took the cellphone picture below.)

So what should we make of this phenomenon? Just as the birds fleeing the Indonesian coast warned of the Christmas tsunami, to me the birds are warning us that global warming or climate change, which made our New Jersey winter mild and free of snow, is having an effect, thus making it possible for these birds to expand their range.

MH, the scientist, went to his records. It is true, he said, that birds have been known to show up early, according to what he's read in the records of John Bull, Whitmer Stone and Ludlow Griscom. However, he also keeps weather records and when he studies the annual Year in Weather published by the New York Times, we didn't have a single day in 2011 where it was colder than normal. In fact, we did have a lot of days warmer than normal.

Prothonotary warbler, NY Public Library

To him, it is evidence of global warming.

In this we agree.

As an observer, I find the trend frightening, and not just because I am not one of those who dreams of perpetual summer, wearing flip-flops and tank-tops all year and trips to the Jersey Shore. Warmer days means more power needed for air conditioners and more water for our plants and ourselves.

People act as though we have unlimited resources. We don't. After a particularly heavy rain this week one of my neighbors' automatic sprinklers went on. I guess he couldn't be bothered to put it on only when necessary. Like the lawn services, coming on their schedule, not when the lawns need cutting.

I have no answer for this. It is particularly depressing to try to explain these things to people and be considered an old crank. I hope the children of the world learn the importance of the environment and do a better job teaching their parents.

---

A postscript:

The nest box in my backyard is finally in use. This afternoon I came out from the porch and saw one of the house wrens fly to the box opening. Cheeping ensued. At my appearance the neighbor's chained-up dog started barking and wouldn't stop until I went inside. This is the yin and yang of my life in the suburbs.

An apology about the formatting of some of my older posts

Hello, friends. When I was just starting this blog I was trying to understand the many functions Blogspot gave me. So as I finished each post I would delink the headlines since I thought it odd that when I clicked on the headline it just took me to the same post.

I now realize I had disabled your ability to look at each individual post.

I figured out what I had done today when I tried to access an older post as a link for "Nesting" (see below) by clicking on the headline. It sent me back to my most recent post.

This stupidity on my part affects most of the older posts up to and including December 2011's "Call Me Restless." I have yet to figure out a way to put the link back into the older headlines, and Blogspot seems to have taken the choice away from me. All suggestions appreciated.

In the meantime, you can still read the posts as you are scrolling through my accumulated work.

Sorry about that.

Nesting

The other day I chased some deer off my property, a common activity now that the shrubbery is all leafed out and the grass grows long between mowings. 

House wren, from last year.

As the white-tails ran off into Greystone across the street, one of my neighbors came out of his house to chat. He pointed out to me something highly unusual - a duck on a nest in his yard.

I didn't see it at first because the duck, a mallard, was perfectly camoflaged with her speckled back and dull appearance. She had her bill tucked in and was within a thick, fenced-in stand of irises in a small area under a large shade tree. My neighbor told me his wife had accidentally scared up Mother Duck - which is how she found the nest - and there were 11 eggs.

My neighbor and his wife are being protective of the duck nest, as I would be, and I can only hope the ducklings will be able to safely follow their mother off the nest, through the backyards, into Greystone - my neighbors' backyard abuts the edge of the property - and into Thompson Brook where they can grow.

At this time of year there are already birds on nests in New Jersey. Were I still working in Englewood Cliffs I'd have seen redtails Harold and Maud feeding young by now on the nest I discovered. Same with the robin nest I found in the courtyard of my former office building.

Birds are not alone. I always associate Memorial Day weekend with the one year a doe decided to drop a fawn on the end of my lawn, out in the open, right at the curb. When I saw it all curled up I thought it was dead. It was not. I worried that someone's dog would get at it so I did what I've always done at such times - I called my brother-in-law in NH, the teaching naturalist.

Newborn fawns have no smell, he told me, so as far as a dog would be concerned, it would just be part of the scenery.

That wouldn't apply to humans, however, and Mother Doe must've known this because the next day the fawn was off the curb and in the long grass behind my house near the flood wall. Our mower was still in the shop and the backyard looked like a meadow. The fawn stayed there a day or two before its mother led it someplace else. That was the first and, so far, last time.

I've also found a rabbit nest when I was clearing leaves from around a shrub at the side of the house. I quickly put the leaves back on it and then checked with my brother-in-law. He said that as long as I hadn't touched the young they'd be OK.

I am sure if I wanted to do so I would find a lot of nests in the shrubs and in the weeds at the borders of my backyard. Some of my other neighbors whose backyards border Greystone have seen skunk, racoon and fox families, and I was once awakened in the wee hours of a mid-May morning by a surreal sound that turned out to be mob of owlettes - likely great horned owl at that time of year - begging their mother for food. When I came outside in a futile attempt to look for them, Mother Owl silently led them away, their calls receding.

House wren nest box

Cardinals, catbirds and robins are more likely nesters in my yard, as are sparrows and house finches, with more birds such as woodpeckers and chickadees in holes in the trees. 

You probably have nests, too. If you find them please leave them alone and do not move them to what you think is a safer or more convenient location. The birds usually know what they are doing and if you move the nests you are dooming the young.

There is one nest in my yard that I can easily see - the box I hang from my apple tree for the house wrens. Every year at least one pair usually makes a nest and raise young in that box. This year, however, like everything else - roses blooming in April, certain migrant birds arriving weeks early, summer weather in winter - something is off and the wrens have not nested in the box.

That doesn't mean they haven't found my backyard, however. For the last few mornings, at first light, a house wren has been singing vigorously, proclaiming to the world this is his territory and he's protecting it. He's more reliable than my alarm clock!

Once in a while, if I'm out on the porch at the right time, I've seen a second wren flying around the yard with him. So there must be a nest somewhere, perhaps in my big hedge.

I'm leaving them alone. Perhaps the next brood will be in the box where I can see them develop.

Birding in One Place

There are competitors who run marathons. Then there are those who sit to win.

New Jersey's World Series of Birding was Saturday, May 12, and unlike the baseball series this only lasts one day.

The Big Stay Team

At 7am on this particular Saturday, Scherman Hoffman sanctuary director Mike Anderson and his team were at their perch on the hawk watch observation platform high in the Bernardsville, N.J., hills. As the sun rose over the trees they had already seen or heard over 50 types of birds, an impressive total made more so if you know they had spent the night in sleeping bags on this platform, tallying what was out there starting at midnight.

The World Series of Birding is a charitable competition that began in Cape May in 1984 with the aim being to find as many birds as possible in a day and collecting money based on how much is pledged per bird. The winnings go towards bird habitat conservation.

Within the competition are divisions. Some of the most competitive teams run all day, from midnight to midnight. You need a reliable car and lot of people to see or hear a lot of birds in very short periods of time because these folks must zip from High Point in the northwest corner of the state to Cape May at the southern tip and as many places as they can hit in between. Before the day of competition they’ve already scouted locations and worked out their route for maximum birding in minimum time. NJ Audubon’s Cape May Observatory has such a marathon team, as does the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY, and many others from farther away. Many have corporate sponsorship. One winning NJ team included the famed Roger Tory Peterson, who helped them find 201 species in 24 hours, and that put the competition on the map.

But there are also teams that, while competitive, are not quite as gung-ho about it. One category is to bird only Cape May, which makes sense because the area has so many types of birds, both resident and passing through.

Some don’t even spend the whole day at it. Another small team out of Scherman Hoffman, led by Randy Little, left the sanctuary at 7 am. Their route took them through the Scherman Hoffman trails and into the neighboring Cross Estate, which is part of the federal Jockey Hollow park several miles away. By the time they got back at noon they had 61 birds and still weren’t done, heading out in two cars (after a brief rest back at the sanctuary) to bird parts of the nearby Great Swamp. They planned to finish at 3pm.

Black-throated green warbler, Scherman
Hoffman, May 12, 2012

Mike’s team was part of the Big Stay division, which means recording what you see and hear from one place, in this case the platform on the third floor of the visitor center.

Sitting is harder than you might think. You need a strong constitution, a comfortable chair and at least two people with good hearing as well as binoculars and scopes because one must verify the other’s findings for the birds to count. (What you really need is at least three so one can go to the bathroom while the others listen.) A sense of humor helps, too. It was cold that Friday night into Saturday morning, the platform was hard for sleeping and then the sun came out in a cloudless sky and the day got pretty hot, dry and breezy.

But there are payoffs.

The first bird recorded on the platform after midnight was a screech owl, the second a booming great horned owl. As the sun came up, the hungry migrants who needed to eat and rest from their journey north started hitting the trees and singing. The scarlet tanagers were easily scene; the Baltimore orioles (like the one pictured), black-throated blue warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, ovenbirds and great-crested flycatchers among those easily heard.

Then came quieter ones like the Cape May warbler, its call weak but its face striking, that showed up on the spruce branch at eye level with the platform. Or the magnolia warbler in the tall holly, which was seen as those on the platform (which now included visitors drawn by the prospect of a good birding day) were joking about being fooled yet again by a house sparrow. It quickly became all business as binoculars were raised and the holly raked over until just the tiniest bit of movement revealed the bird, which showed for a millisecond before flying to a tree farther away. Still, it counted.

Common birds are counted, too - cardinal, titmouse, white-breasted nuthatch, catbird, robin. This is probably one of the few times a house finch at the feeder or a flock of flying grackles or a lone starling are celebrated.


Baltimore oriole, Scherman
Hoffman, May 12, 2012

 Meanwhile, Randy’s team had made its way along the driveway and down to the river, finding a number of warblers including a rare (for the sanctuary) Wilson’s warbler plus other birds, some of whom will breed in the sanctuary. Up on the platform, the sitting team could not hear the calls of the Wilson’s warbler or the Louisiana waterthrush that shows up every year along the river trail because the leafed-out trees blocked the sound. But they could see the common loon and great blue heron that flew over.

It is like the blind men and the elephant. The perspective is different depending on where you are.

As Randy’s team kept moving, trying to find as many birds as their limited time allowed, Mike’s team had tallied 73 birds by 1:15 pm, including broad-winged and sharp-shinned hawks. The team had long ago shed their warm jackets and had switched from finding migrant songbirds to the daytime raptors taking advantage of perfect weather conditions to fly north.

Had Mike and his team - which won the Big Stay division last year with 80 - been out in the field, driving hither and yon, they might not have been as relaxed as they were (when birds weren’t sighted, of course) or as Randy’s small group were in their limited travels. To these people it was a competition but it was also an excuse to get out of the house and do something they enjoy.

Some people let the competition - ticking off the birds on a list - take over. Some people are nice, some can be jerks. Some will be helpful and point out a bird you might‘ve otherwise missed, others will ignore you when you ask what they’ve seen figuring they worked for it and so should you.

What can get lost, even in the World Series of Birding, is the birds themselves. Imagine, 73 different types of birds seen or heard just by sitting in one place. It could be you in your backyard if you were lucky and had the time or the inclination to just sit and listen.

Not many do.

The totals, as of 1:15 pm, May 12, 2012

We should be grateful there are events like the World Series of Birding to remind us that habitat, in New Jersey and elsewhere, is being obliterated by housing “developments,” utility lines and golf courses. The money earned by the Series winners will help preserve what land is left for the birds.

When the winners were announced the next day neither Mike’s nor Randy’s team won their divisions. The most birds seen in New Jersey in 24 hours were 207 - 207! - by a marathon group that included Pete Dunne, who was with that previous winning group featuring Roger Tory Peterson that had found 201 species.

The Big Stay division winner, with 80 species, was a N.J. Audubon team out of Atlantic County, on the ocean just north of Cape May County and where the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, otherwise known as Brigintine, is located. Mike’s team ended up with 77.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, the birds continue their marathons north. The winners of this World Series get to create another generation for us to enjoy.

Listen to the Mockingbird

If you want to know what kinds of birds are in a particular area, look for a mockingbird.

I say “look,” because you will recognize the gray thrush-like bird with the long tail with white edges and a white patch on each wing.

What you won’t recognize is its song. It doesn’t have one.

Found in all 50 US states, this bird takes the songs of other birds it hears, which is why it is a particularly good indicator of what’s around that particular patch. The mockingbird will repeat a call anywhere from two to 20 times before switching to another. It can literally sing for hours.

My father-in-law told me he was once entranced for 30 minutes by the repertoire of a gray bird on his roof, which I identified for him as a mockingbird. These birds make it easy for you to find them. They like to sit on a roof or high in a tree or on a structure next to something that will amplify his singing. I’ve seen them singing in a giant satellite dish and on a tall, bare tree that was close to a building, which provided an echo.

The bird is called the northern mockingbird but I can’t imagine why since all my associations with the bird are with the south. There’s the wonderful “To Kill a Mockingbird” - both the book and movie - which takes place in the south. It is the state bird of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, all once part of the Confederacy.

I have heard as many as six mockingbirds singing at the same time, at an apartment complex near the water in Jersey City. I have heard as many as three widely scattered around a parking lot. Usually you’ll hear a hissing as the singer chases an interloper out of his territory. About the only time I don’t see mockingbirds chase other mockingbirds away is when a male needs to find a female.

Mockingbirds aren’t intimidated by size either - my husband and I have seen them chase American crows, grackles and even redtailed hawks away from a nest or, when chasing off a robin, a bush filled with berries. (Like its cousins the robins and bluebirds, mockingbirds don’t come to feeders unless you are providing them fruit. But since they are so possessive I don’t bother.)

They will sing early in the morning and late into the evening, for long periods of time. In New York City I have heard them imitate car alarms pretty effectively.

I recorded one once in an Englewood Cliffs, N.J., parking lot not far from the Palisades and among the calls that I recognized were a blue jay, great crested flycatcher, robin, titmouse, gull, cardinal, carolina wren, red-winged blackbird, redbellied woodpecker and a white-breasted nuthatch - and that was just in 2 minutes, 28 seconds.

(Here is another mockingbird someone else recorded and posted on YouTube.)

For a bird with no song it shows up in a lot of songs. There’s lyricist Johnny Mercer of Savannah, Ga., who put the mockingbird in many of his songs including “Blues in the Night.”

There’s the folksong “Listen to the Mocking Bird.” (An alternate spelling. The song is from the mid-nineteenth century.)

There’s the familiar children’s lullaby that begins, "Hush, little baby, don't say a word, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird" - a song sampled by Eminem, of all people, in his sad song about the breakup of his family.

The lullaby was updated by Inez and Charlie Foxx in 1963 for their hit “Mockingbird,“ later covered by a lot of people including (as seen on YouTube) Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, the cast of “Dumb and Dumber” and Carly Simon and her then-husband James Taylor.

There’s also another song of loss, by Rob Thomas, that goes: You and me tried everything/But still that mockingbird won't sing.

Must be pretty bad for Rob because the mockingbirds I’ve found have had no trouble singing.

What is it about the mockingbird that brings out the melancholy in some people? Perhaps it’s the constant melodic singing that makes people think of another constant that might be gone, like love?

Thankfully, the mockingbird’s song doesn’t have that effect on me.