Following John Burroughs

 The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us. -- John Burroughs, from "Spring Jottings"

I own a lot of books that deal with birds and nature. I have a paperback copy of what might be the first writing devoted to carefully studying the flora and fauna of a particular area, "The Natural History of Selbourne" by English churchman Gilbert White. I have several volumes written by John Muir, whose detailed writings about Yosemite in California's Sierra Nevada mountains helped protect it first as a state, then as a national park. Muir then turned his sights on Alaska, exploring glaciers - including the one later named for him.

The view from Boyhood Rock - Slide Mountain with Burroughs'
grave in the foreground. (Margo D. Beller)

Henry David Thoreau's most famous book is his detailed study of his home area of Concord, Mass., and the nearby woods, "Walden." More recently, Aldo Leopold wrote about his Wisconsin farm in "Sand County Almanac." His book, like Muir's, promoted the importance of nature and our relationship with it in an increasingly industrial world.

And then there is John Burroughs.

I don't remember how I first heard of John of the birds, so called to distinguish him from John (Muir) of the mountains. My husband (MH) was surprised to learn I had not read him, although I had read OF him in John Taliafarro's biography of environmentalist Robert Bird Grinnell who, with Burroughs and Muir, were part of industrialist E.W. Harriman's Alaska expedition of 1899.

So I got two books of Burroughs' essays from the library and found a sort of kindred spirit, though I'll never be the naturalist - or the writer - he was.

Burroughs, born in a brown wooden house in Roxbury, N.Y., did his nature writing on the side while making a living as a teacher. Later, after he married, he took a job with the U.S. Treasury Dept., living in Washington, D.C. on the north side of the Capitol, in a house on a one-acre lot where he let his cow out to pasture on what later became the National Mall. It was at this time he met and befriended the poet Walt Whitman, who became the subject of his first book.

Woodchuck Lodge (Margo D. Beller)

But he did not enjoy being stuck in a government office, as he notes in his essay "A Cow in the Capital":

I planted myself as deep in the soil as I could, to restore the normal tone and freshness of my system, impaired by the above mentioned government mahogany.

Having been stuck in enough offices when I'd rather be out birding, I can commiserate.

So he and his family went home to New York, where he built a house in Esopus, near the Hudson River. Then he built a cabin nearby he called Slabsides and there he began writing in earnest. His essays were published in influential magazines and he soon became a best-selling author, his prose striking a chord with those city people who wanted to retain a connection with nature or remembered when their families lived on farms.

As a youth I was a philosopher, as a young man an Emersonian; as a middle-aged man I was a literary naturalist - but always have I been an essayist. (from "An Egotistical Chapter")

In the summer the family would go back to Roxbury, to another brown wooden house built by his brother and named Woodchuck Lodge. He would write in the hay barn. When he wanted inspiration he would climb to what he called his Boyhood Rock and look out at Slide Mountain, the tallest of the Catskills, and listen to the birds and commune with nature.

As he became successful he made a lot of rich and powerful friends - President Theodore Roosevelt, inventor Thomas Edison, automaker Henry Ford. All had a great love of nature. They would visit Woodchuck Lodge or the group would go on long hikes. It helped to have such friends. After Burroughs died in 1921, Ford bought the lodge to preserve it and the surrounding grounds. It was eventually incorporated as John Burroughs' Woodchuck Lodge Inc. One-tenth of a mile from the lodge is an open area that is a New York State Historic Area. It includes a path up to Boyhood Rock and Burroughs' grave.

Plaque on Boyhood Rock: I stand amid the eternal ways and
what is mine shall know my face. (Margo D. Beller) 

MH and I visited on Oct. 16 as part of our annual trek to see autumn leaf color.

The lodge is only open the first Saturday of the month until October, but it has been under renovation for years and we had not planned to enter. I wanted to see it and the hay barn where he wrote. It was a windy day, making it cold enough for me to need my winter parka. Then we drove down the road, parked and made the climb to the Rock. 

Between MH's knees and my previous falls, we both climbed very carefully. My wrist reminded me that it was still not 100%. I listened for birds but only heard a blue jay. MH and I sat on the bench provided and looked at Slide Mountain, 25 miles away, with Burroughs' grave in the foreground. Like the rock on the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of Burroughs' influences, Boyhood Rock was Burroughs' headstone.

The silence was overwhelming. Except for a distant raven and a woodpecker softly tapping on a tree near us, it was quiet. No cars. No leaf blowers. No yapping kids or dogs. Just a mountain ahead of us and peace all around us. I almost cried. No wonder the man came here for inspiration. 

One of the few bits of deep color we saw in our travels.
(Margo D. Beller)

What we love to do, that we do well. To know is not all; it is only half. To love is the other half. (from "The Art of Seeing Things")

I thought of all the times I've been in parks, listening or trying to see birds, as I was passed by runners wearing noise-cancelling headphones, groups of chatting walkers or bikers zooming through. Rare is the time someone stops and asks if I've found anything "good," rarer still they tell me of the birds they've seen. Most people seem to use the park as background, to "get into nature" while paying as little attention to it as possible as they move through quickly. 

Before MH and I made our very careful descent to our car, I opened the wooden hutch where visitors could sign in and make comments. When the doors opened a small, winged insect flew out and into my open parka pocket. Maybe it sought more warmth than what the hutch provided. I tried to find the insect but it stayed hid. I wrote in the register, "Making the pilgrimage to a great man and writer." As I turned to leave, the small insect flew out of my pocket and landed on Burroughs' grave. 

I think Burroughs would've appreciated that moment.

My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. (from "My Boyhood")

 

The Dangers of Youth

"The energy of youth is infectious, but its inexperience is dangerous."

-- Charles de Gaulle

As every parent knows, there are many dangers out there. You give birth, you feed your young, you keep them clean and you try to protect them from predators as best you can. But in the end there is only so much you can do to prepare them for leaving the nest. The young will have to learn to fend for themselves and, with luck, survive to create a new generation.

This is true for all creatures, including birds.

Parent feeding young (This and other pictures from 2020.)
(Margo D. Beller)

The other day, from my porch, I saw two male house sparrows attacking the house wren nest box hanging in my dogwood tree. Had the opening been large enough, one or the other would've gone in, dragged out the wrenlets, killed them and taken over the box. Why there were two males instead of a male and a female, as I saw a few weeks ago, I don't know.

But there they were, so here I went outside to clap my hands to chase them off. When they were gone I heard an angry chittering from the box and then one of the parent house wrens flew out - it had blocked the opening to protect its young. "You're welcome," I said as I walked away. Soon the parents went back to shuttling food to their young.

I did not immediately go back on the porch. I walked to the driveway because I heard the high-pitched screaming of a robin and I sensed something was wrong. Two birds were going at it across the street, or so I thought. I've seen robins fighting each other before in territorial disputes but this turned out to be different.

One of the birds, a young robin (the breast spotted rather than red), flew across the street to the bottom of my yew hedge and hid under one of the small, bare branches near the ground that stick out and prevent me from weeding in that area. The other bird flew at it and I knew by the fanned, striped tail it was no robin but a similarly sized male sharp-shinned hawk. It must've seen me standing there because after the one attempt it took off. Then the chickadees and titmice in the neighbor's walnut tree started their alarm calls. I walked around the hedge and there was the hawk. It was a brown juvenile. Had it been a gray adult that young robin would've been supper. I clapped my hands, the hawk flew off and the little birds went quiet.

(Margo D. Beller)

Hawks have to eat, too, I know, but not in my yard.

Which brings me back to the house wrens.

For the first time since I started writing about the house wren nest box (in 2011; unfortunately, the link no longer works), I happened to be on the porch and saw the young fledge.

I knew that time was coming soon. The young birds had gotten so big they were being fed by the parents from outside the box. It must've been very crowded and uncomfortable in that box, especially when the temperature soared into the upper 80 degrees F to 90 degrees this week. A parent would occasionally push the young aside to go inside the box to remove poop. When an adult was near I could hear the young begging for food. Lately, the head of a curious wrenlet had been coming partway through the box opening.

I watched this last part with trepidation. Years ago, when the nest box was in the apple tree, a wrenlet fell out of the box and was snatched up by a jay before I could get outside to rescue it. Jays, like their cousins the corvids (including crows and ravens) are among those that will eat young birds. So will squirrels, one of which I saw being harried all over the yard by an angry house wren parent.

So when I saw the little head looking so far out of the box I was concerned, especially when a male sparrow flew to the dogwood. 

I walked to the window and rapped on it. The house sparrow left. That was when I saw that along with the house wren looking out was another small house wren on top of the nest box.

Close to leaving.
(Margo D. Beller)

I had no camera with me. The best I could do was take a picture with my phone from the porch. (It was easier photographing the nest box from outside when it was in the apple tree, and the pictures for this post are from 2020, before I moved the box.) I wouldn't have dared missing anything for a camera anyway.

The first wrenlet flew to a higher branch of the dogwood. The second got closer and closer to leaving the box. A parent came to feed it, then the adult flew to base of the bushes on the other side of the flood wall. I could hear the male parent calling to the young. Finally, the second wrenlet left the box and jumped to a side branch, where it did a little climbing and pecked at leaves. It stumbled a bit but did not fall.

Then, a third head poked out of the box. 

One by one its siblings flew from the dogwood down behind the flood wall, where I'm sure at least one of the parents was waiting. The third one didn't bother jumping to a branch, it flew directly to where the others had gone. No doubt it was hungry and the male's calls told the three they had to fly out if they wanted to be fed.

Now the box is quiet, unless there is a second brood later in the summer. 

The wrens aren't the only young in the yard, of course. I've seen a male cardinal fly to the feeder pole with one of its young, which was the same size and brown like a female but without the red crest and beak. The scared chickadees and titmice were the first indication there were families in the vicinity of my yard since I stopped putting out bird food. 

Not the greatest picture but if you look close
you'll see one wren in the opening and
another atop the box. 2025
(Margo D. Beller)

And, of course, there are young deer. Earlier this week a doe was in the next yard with a tiny fawn drinking her milk. When the doe saw me standing in my yard and looking at them she led the tiny fawn away. For now my yard is safe from curious young nibbling at my plants, learning what tastes good.

Like the fawn, the young birds will be fed by their parents for a time and then will have to fend for themselves. Some, like the juvenile hawk, will need a lot of practice grabbing supper. Others, like the wrens, will be helping my yard by catching a ton of insects. But the young birds will also learn they must avoid predators to survive, and that includes other birds, cats, dogs and humans. 

They will travel with their parents for a time but eventually they will be on their own.

A Day In the Life of H. Wren

About 10 days from the end of April, I read several reports of house wrens returning to areas of New Jersey close, as the wren flies, to where I live. I had been avidly awaiting this news for weeks. Two days later, with my husband steadying the ladder, I hung the nest box in the dogwood tree, which had beat the odds and come back to flowering life after I had the dead wood removed.

The nest box in the dogwood
(Margo D. Beller)

Hanging a nest is an annual ritual. It started when a friend gave me a small, decorative bird house that I hung in one of the apple trees. It soon drew a house wren, perhaps the only bird that could have fit through the small opening. I hung that bird house out every year until it fell apart. I've used a sturdier (and slightly larger) nest box ever since, first hung in the one apple tree I didn't take down and then in the dogwood so I could see it more easily from my seat on the enclosed porch.

I hung the box and waited. And waited.

Seemingly the day after hanging it the weather turned winter-like. Northbound migration was altered as birds avoided the north winds of the northeast and traveled up through the midwest. Seedllings were left on window sills because it was too cold to plant them. The down quilt stayed on the bed.

Finally, at the very end of April the winds turned around, the temperatures warmed dramatically and the migration floodgates were opened in my region. One early walk I heard house wrens calling. On May 1 I heard the same call from my yard. A bird checked out the nest box, my feeders, the immediate area. Would he find a mate and would she want to nest in my box?

Yes and yes, a day later. Hooray.

Thanks to having more time to spend on the porch, I could see details I'd missed in previous years.

House wren from a previous year. I haven't tried to take
a picture of this year's pair yet. (Margo D. Beller)

On May 3 the pair took turns bringing large sticks to the box to create the nest where they will likely raise two to three chicks. (The Cornell Ornithology Lab people say it could be as many as 10, but that would be too many for this box.) Each bird came back with sticks too large to fit in the doorway as held in its beak. Each bird had to re-learn that if he or she turned his or her head, the sticks could be put inside. Or, if the stick was thin enough, the bird could just ram it through the hole. Both birds had to do this many times. It became comical to watch.

But they kept at it. The next day, May 4, it was only the female working on the nest, bringing in smaller sticks to put on the finishing touches. As far as I could see the male did not go into the box. I could tell which bird was which because he sang from another branch. She did not.

On May 5 it rained. There was some movement in and out of the box by the female and singing at dawn by the male. However, I was inside for most of the day and so do not know when or where any mating took place. Because that is the next step - the female has to lay eggs and she has to sit on them on the nest they made. 

Once again I regretted not buying one of those minuscule cameras I could have put inside the box and get an entirely different view. If they do what I've seen other wrens do over the years, the female will be in the box much of the time and the male will be singing nearby. If a larger bird it considers a threat - such as a house sparrow interested in taking the box for itself (it can't fit through the opening but that doesn't mean it won't try and destroy the eggs) - the wren will drive it off, if I don't first. When the female needs to get a meal he will stay close to the box until she returns.

Feeding the young from the outside. (Margo D. Beller -
From 2020 when I hung the box in the apple tree.)

Once the chicks hatch their mother won't leave them unless she has to eat. At that point the male will sit close by. Then she'll return to feed them and keep them warm. When they get bigger both parents will only go into the nest to feed them. As the young get even bigger they will get noisier and will be fed by both parents from outside the box. 

The whole incubation/nesting process will only last a few weeks. At some point I've yet to catch the parents will stop feeding them but will call the young from nearby - you have to leave the nest to get a meal, kids. The young will fly out and the nest stay empty. The family will hang out around the yard for a time, maybe a week or so, and then disperse.

If I am lucky, another wren - or maybe the same male - will find the box, bring a female that approves of it and they'll use the sticks I'll leave in there for their nest. At the end of the year the house wrens will head south and the box will be taken down, emptied, cleaned and stowed away until next spring.

It is an annual ritual that brings me closer to the life of a tiny, plain, brown bird that graces my yard for a few weeks. 

The Study of Nature

Do schools teach earth science anymore? Is there discussion in the classroom about nature and all the things one sees when outdoors?

"Anna Botsford Comstock 1854-1930" by USDAgov is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Nowadays, it seems we hear more about what CAN'T be taught in schools or what should not be allowed to be taught in schools than about what IS taught in schools. (I am not a teacher and do not have children, so I don't know.)

During the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002, the U.S. enacted the "No Child Left Behind" law. At that time Bush was quoted as saying:

"We're gonna spend more money, more resources, but they'll be directed at methods that work. Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work." (emphasis mine)

According to Brittanica, that meant "states were required to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward raising the scores of all students to a level defined as 'proficient' or higher by 2014. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of staff or closure."

Rather than helping students, the rules forced teachers to concentrate more on offering enough learning to live up to the testing standards than to actually educate the primary and secondary school kids. (Earth science was not considered worthy of mention.) The rules were eventually eased during the Obama administration.

Back around the turn of the last century, the concerns were different. There was no TV or internet to distract children and keep them indoors. The people at Cornell University's agricultural college thought teachers should have a guide to explain how children should see the outdoors - basically everything animal, vegetable or mineral except humans. 

Another difference: Back then it was much more common to see farms, and agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy. According to Statistica, in 2022 there were just over 2 million farms in the U.S., compared with 2.2 million in 2007, and the average size has been steadily decreasing. 

But farmland was decreasing long before 2007 as post-World War II population increases prompted an explosion in housing on what used to be crop-growing fields, such as the famous Levittown development in Garden City, Long Island, NY.

Back before suburbs took over farmland, Cornell wanted a "Handbook of Nature Study" to be available for teachers. To write it, the university turned to the only woman on staff, Anna Botsford Comstock. She had been a student at Cornell - one of the first - and met her husband, John Henry Comstock, there. She eventually made engravings for illustrative plates for her husband's books on insects and butterflies, as well as for her own books on nature studies, including bees.

It was when she was appointed to the New York State Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture in 1895 that she planned and conducted an experimental course of nature study for public schools, which resulted in her "Handbook."

The book has never gone out of print. The used copy my husband recently bought was the 22nd edition of the 1974 printing, with a new introduction written in 1986. It is even available for download.

You could say Anna Botsford Comstock was the original ecologist, though the word was not in existence in 1911. 

The first part of her guide explains teaching nature study, why such learning is important and what to do (and not do) to get a child interested. The next sections cover animals (including mammals, fishes and birds), plants (including wildflowers and weeds) and earth and sky (including soil, rocks, water and, most interesting to me, climate and weather).

(Margo D. Beller)

Nature study gives a child "practical and helpful knowledge. It makes him familiar with nature's ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters," she writes. "Nature-study cultivates the child's imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affects his imagination as much as does fairy lore..."

And here's something to consider in these days of social media, artificial intelligence and not being able to tell what is true from what isn't: "Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. Nature-study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are."

Think about that the next time you read an article about how children are spending more time inside on TikTok than they are on their studies.

Within each section are lessons for teachers, and sometimes interesting quotations. For instance, in the section on the woodchuck, the teacher is encouraged to take students outside to find a woodchuck burrow and, if the animal appears, study it. The teacher can discuss such things as when young woodchucks are born, how many can live in the same burrow and the animal's physical characteristics.

At the end of that section was a long excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Journal, including: "I think I might learn some wisdom of him," he says of a woodchuck he encountered during a walk and stayed to study. "His ancestors have lived here longer than mine. He is more thoroughly acclimated and naturalized than I."

Thoreau spent his life being outside as much as he could, observing nature and writing down his findings. He did not need a handbook to tell him what he could see around him, but not everyone is a Thoreau.

In the urbanized, suburbanized, commercialized, technology-driven world we now live in, where climate change is altering the way we interact with the world, it is heartening when we read of young people who are angry about what is happening in the world they've inherited, and are trying to do something about it.

But they may be the exception. You have to have an interest in the outside world to care anything about it. Which brings me back to my original question: Is earth science (or ecology or whatever you want to call it) taught in school anymore?

Anna Comstock gets the last word: "When it is properly taught, the child is unconscious of mental effort or that he is suffering the act of teaching. As soon as nature-study becomes a task, it should be dropped; but how could it ever be a task to see that the sky is blue, or the dandelion golden or to listen to the oriole in the elm!"

Baltimore oriole (Margo D. Beller)

Apples and Wrens, Yet Again

In my yard, the apple tree and the house wren nest box are forever linked, and not just because until two years ago the box was in that tree. From late June into July, both are busy with young. In the tree's case, that means a lot of ripe, edible apples drawing squirrels, insects and birds. For the birds, it means the parent wrens taking turns flying to the box to feed their chicks.

House wren feeding young, 2022 (Margo D. Beller)

For the past two weeks, the young - two? three? Can't be much more in that small box - have grown. I know this because now when a wren comes to the box, the sounds of begging are loud enough for me to hear without opening a porch window. The parent can't get inside. It flies to the opening and whichever chick has muscled its way to the front gets the insect meal. 

As for the old tree, last year there was so much rain we had an abundance of apples, so many I had to sort what I picked (or picked up when the squirrels dropped them so the deer didn't get any) and put the ones I knew I wouldn't use in a corner of the yard for the critters. Even then I made several quarts of apple sauce. This year, either because there has been less rain or the squirrels took advantage of my being away for five days on vacation, there have been fewer apples in a good condition to use, enough for one pail rather than my larger apple basket. I intend to use what I have and leave none for the critters. If I'm lucky, by the time I cut off the bad parts and cook the good ones, I'll get one quart out of all of them.

Two of the last apples of 2022. A squirrel later got one of them.
(Margo D. Beller)

Some years, things get out of whack between the nesting and the fruiting. There have been years when the squirrels started going into the tree earlier, in mid-June, for the juicy apples because we were in an unusually hot stretch. In those years I would be concerned the squirrels would disturb the wren sitting on eggs and the tree would survive the drought. There have been other years when the young wrens have fledged before apples were ready to be picked. Some years the tree would not have many flowers in the spring, and that would be a year when I would not be making much apple sauce, if at all. 

It was during a plentiful year that I had to use an extension pole to knock down apples if I wanted to use any, thus disturbing the wrens as much as the squirrels. That was when I decided to move the nest box to the dogwood on the other side of the yard, which also allowed me to watch the wren activity more easily.

(Margo D. Beller)

Any day now I expect to bring my morning coffee to the porch and see no feeding and hear no begging. Every so often I've been hearing one of the parents calling from a shrub, trying to draw out its young. At the moment they are, like a lot of young nowadays, happy to stay at home. Why go out when Mom or Dad brings me what I need?

However, unlike their human counterparts, the wrens' brains are hardwired to continue the species. At some point instinct will kick in and they will leave box, learn how to fly and feed themselves, and then leave in late fall for their winter grounds. If they survive the trip, they'll fly north next spring to pair up, find a suitable nesting spot, mate and make more young. 

As usual, I hope at least two of them will be in my yard.

Following New Jersey's Passaic River

This post is based on one that originally ran on August 5, 2015, on the blog of New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary. The NJA blog was significantly overhauled since then and the archives were deleted. However, I was able to keep a copy so this can again see the light of day.

Recently, MH and I went to the Great Swamp. It is spring, and I wanted to see what might've been hanging around. I also wanted to get MH out and walking. I took him to a 0.6 mile loop toward the back of the property where the education center named for Helen Fenske is located. (Fenske led the call to keep the area a swamp rather than turn it into the New York metro area's fourth major airport.) This trail was flat and cindered so he could walk it easily.

Passaic River, Bernardsville, NJ, not far from the source. (Margo D. Beller)

I have been on it before and usually take the left fork. With MH we went right, and almost immediately were on the banks of the Passaic River, the natural border between Morris County, where we stood, and Somerset County on the other side.

While I scanned the banks for birds, MH voiced his amazement. "I never knew this was so close to the Fenske Center," he said. "I've lived in New Jersey almost all my life and never knew this was here." MH's nickname is Mr. Map because he uses (and collects) maps and is rarely ever lost, so finding a river someplace unexpected really threw him.

This happened once before, when I wrote a post for the NJ Audubon blog on the Passaic River. One of the Scherman Hoffman sanctuary trails goes along the river. One autumn day, driving to the place, I saw the river through the trees. When I got home I pulled out one of MH's detailed maps and realized that when I passed Liddell's Pond, I was passing the source. I showed MH the map and he was amazed. "I never knew that was the source," he said.

We both learned a lot from the post, as you'll see below:

Every river, even the mighty Mississippi, starts small. Water bubbles to the surface from underground and gravity brings it downhill. As it rains, the waters rise, the flow increases and brooks and streams are created. They feed larger water forms that have become rivers.

Before highways took us from Point A to B, New Jersey and the other original 13 colonies were wooded wilderness. It was hard traveling over the land so people and their goods got from one town to the other via river. If you remove the highways from a map of New Jersey and look at where the state's original towns were located, the importance of rivers becomes more obvious.

For a small state, there are many rivers, among them the Delaware on the state's western coast, the Hudson on the east and, within, the Raritan and the Hackensack.

What these rivers have in common, besides their importance in trade and transportation, is they are natural borders between states and counties.

The border between New Jersey's Morris and Somerset counties is the Passaic River. "Passaic," if you believe Wikipedia, is from the Lenape word "pahsayèk," which has been variously attributed to mean "valley" or "place where the land splits." There are many sources where you can learn more about the river's history, starting with the formation about 11,000 years ago of the Ice Age's Glacial Lake Passaic.

At 80 to 90 miles (depending on which source you use), the Passaic is one of the the longest rivers in New Jersey, starting in Mendham, Morris County, and ending up the much larger river that drops in a giant waterfall at Paterson and flows by Newark before emptying into New York Bay.

The river is very noticeable if you are walking Scherman's yellow-blazed River trail. At this point the Passaic is about the size of a large brook and filled with rocks. Water draws bugs, and the Passaic is no exception. Birders put up with this because bugs draw the birds that feed on them. The movement of the river draws flycatching phoebes and the Louisiana waterthrush, which have nested at Scherman for years.

Passaic River plants (Margo D. Beller)

The river ecosystem encourages such plants as trout lily, Canada mayflower, cinnamon ferns and skunk cabbage, one of the first plants to grow in spring. Rivers are a source of life.

I've heard the distinctive rattling of a belted kingfisher flying back and forth along the river looking for fish. The river provides birds and other creatures a place to bathe and feed. Families come to Scherman's part of the Passaic to sit on the shore and cool off during a hot summer day.

The part of the Passaic at Scherman is clean water. But the part at the Newark end is not and its tortured industrial history reminds us rivers can be killed quickly.

Many of suburban New Jersey's rivers are threatened by too many suburban houses and homeowners who over-treat their lawns with chemicals that not only kill beneficial insects but run off in heavy rains into storm sewers and from there to rivers.

That's nothing compared to the lower Passaic. If the upper Passaic is Dr. Jekyll, the lower Passaic is Mr. Hyde.

It has been a major chemical dumping ground for decades, filled with toxins that have hurt people living downriver. Paterson, for instance, was once known as the Silk City because of its mills. That was a long time ago. More recently it has been a byword for crime, urban decay and, thanks to its many now-closed factories, the creator of the "toilet river" that was the Passaic.

As a 2009 New York Times article put it: "The Passaic begins in the clear trout streams of rural Morris County, provides drinking water to 3.5 million New Jersey residents, reaches a peak at the Great Falls of Paterson and then devolves at the end of 80 increasingly foul and dispiriting miles into a dark, malodorous industrial sink."

Six years later I wouldn't eat any fish caught in Paterson.

(Margo D. Beller)

If you go to Scherman Hoffman to hike the trails you are what has become known as an ecotourist. It is a big business in some parts of the world. Towns in New Jersey have been catching up to the concept. The people running the cities and towns along the Passaic, whose people got sick from the chemicals in their air and water, have been literally trying to clean up their act, promoting ecotourism opportunities such as fishing, kayaking, and in the case of Paterson visiting the Great Falls, which only recently became a federal park.

Environmental groups have used the river as a teaching aid. The Hackensack Riverkeeper, for instance, within the last few years has run an ecotour that takes people up the urban end of the Passaic. As with their trips up the Hackensack - another river trying to recover from nearly being killed by industrial pollutants dumped into the Meadowlands marshes - the idea is to show the importance of the river and and how fragile the river's health is still.

Things are slowly improving for the lower Passaic, despite the long time it takes to get a polluting company to pay for river cleanup and government inefficiency.

At the upper Passaic, along the Scherman Hoffman River Trail, we don't have that problem -- at least not yet. It is easy to forget the clean, Dr. Jekyll, suburban one and the polluted, Mr. Hyde, urban one are the same river. But it is connected. The upper Passaic is healthy because its headwaters are not in an industrial area. But it wouldn't take much - say a farm sold to developers who build a massive condo development in a watershed, as many would like to do in the New Jersey Highlands - to do a lot of harm.

Rivers are fragile and their health shouldn't be taken for granted.

Avoiding Pepe Le Pew

According to the 2019 edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac (and it is old, first published in 1792), on Feb. 24 "Skunks mate now."

Never have three little words been so obnoxious.

This means for the last week of this month my windows will continue to be kept tightly shut because there will be a very good chance of stink during the night, either between two male skunks fighting over a female, or a female skunk trying to fight off a male.

The real Pepe le Pew (free photo courtesy of Pixabay/Wikipedia)

Skunks can stink up the area at all times of year, of course. That's how they defend themselves from predators. They use two anal glands that can shoot the noxious spray up to 12 feet away. I can remember being awakened one autumn pre-dawn by the howl of a cat followed by the familiar, pungent odor of a skunk. The cat's eyes would've been stung and the skunk would've skittered off on its short legs.

The common striped skunk, made famous by the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe Le Pew, is the one you’ll find in New Jersey although there are 11 species, nine of them in North America. Like the house cat Pepe frequently mistook for a potential mate, I do my best to avoid skunks.

Sometimes it isn't so easy. In the dark, skunks are very hard to see. When I used to walk the streets of my town in the dark pre-dawn hours to get the train to work, skunks would cross the road ahead of me or, in one memorable case, two baby skunks turned out to be on a lawn next to me as I sensed something nearby in the dark. I walked very slowly away so as not to scare them into spraying. If you don't threaten it, a skunk continues on its way.

Skunks are solitary creatures except during the winter, when several may den together, and in the breeding season that runs roughly from mid-February into March. This is also when you’ll see - or smell - the most road-killed skunks as these nocturnal critters cross roads to find a mate and will treat your fast-approaching car as one big predator to spray.

You might wonder, what is a skunk good for in the greater ecological scheme of things? Skunks will eat the insects that otherwise destroy your plants and lawn or nest in your house: grasshoppers, crickets, beetles and wasps. They love grubs, so if you see deep holes in your lawn you can thank your local skunk. However, skunks, like raccoon and bear, will also eat pet food and garbage left outside.

(free photo courtesy of Pixabay)

That’s why skunks are becoming as common a N.J. sight as gray squirrels, and for the same reason: A well-fed skunk is a breeding skunk. After mating the young are born about two months later, with five to six, on average, to a litter. They will nurse in the den for about a month and a half.

If you presume a skunk has bred in February, the young are active by May, which is just in time for a parent great horned owl that bred in January and hatched its own young to start picking skunks off to feed them. Great horned owls are not put off by skunk smell because they can’t smell the spray.

When owl meets skunk only the smell remains in the morning.

Three Types of Summer's Winged Wonders

Butterflies

This is the time of summer when I go out to the woods and if I see any movement in the trees it is usually a butterfly. The butterflies I see most commonly are tiger swallowtails, dark swallowtails and the occasional monarch butterfly.

Tiger swallowtail (Margo D. Beller)

August into September must be when the caterpillars break out of their cocoons as butterflies. Adult butterflies lay their eggs, the eggs hatch caterpillars, the caterpillars (after eating a lot of leaves, I think) crawl up trees or shrubs to become cocooned pupas and then they hatch as butterflies, which then head south for the winter.

The nice thing about butterflies, besides their many different colors and the way they seem to float in out of nowhere, is they aren't that picky about where they feed. Yes, they have special needs in terms of where they lay eggs, such as the monarch butterfly needing milkweed, but when they need food they will go to any flower, shrub or roadside weed. They will even come to puddles to drink.

I once walked along a road in a strong wind. There was a tiger swallowtail on a Rose of Sharon flower, hanging on for dear life. You would think something so small and delicate would have a problem in wind but this is one strong little creature. 

Butterflies have a lot of fans, which is why you can do a simple search and find all sorts of butterfly clubs to learn more.

Hummingbirds 

When I last wrote about rubythroated hummingbirds, I mentioned the two that were coming regularly to my feeder. I named them Alpha and Beta. Alpha was the more dominant of the two, hence the name. Beta was rather dusky and very skittish at the feeder, hovering over the portal to drink rather than perch as Alpha did.

Much has happened since then.

First, I realized Alpha might have been a male. We had visited our niece in Connecticut and a male hummer had come to her feeder. The male had a dark head, just like Alpha. The next time Alpha visited I had binoculars with me and did not see a lot of red at the throat, although there was a pink tinge. That was the last time I saw Alpha.

A friend's juvenile hummer (Margo D. Beller)

Beta continued to visit much longer and was soon joined by a smaller, greener individual that was definitely a juvenile male. I named that one Delta. Beta would feed in her skitterish fashion and take off in one direction, Delta would feed and head in another direction.

With the heat and humidity I have not spent time on the enclosed porch, the only way I can see the hummingbird feeder, but it seems to me Beta has moved on and what I call Delta may be Epsilon, Gamma or any of a number of hummingbird visitors. Young are fledging and they have to eat. By now the adult males should've been heading south, and soon the adult females and the young birds will be doing the same.

All I know is, at least once a day a hummingbird comes to feed. I still have plenty of food for as long as they come.

Dragonflies 

One of the things that makes walking with MH so enjoyable is we usually look at different things. I will be looking up in the trees for any bird activity while he will be looking down for snakes, toads and other nonwinged creatures.

But one thing that interests him very much, and is now interesting me, are all the dragonflies.

Green dragonfly blending well into leaf. (RE Berg-Andersson)

You can be in a marsh, in a park, in your backyard and you will have a number of these insects buzzing around, picking off mosquitoes and gnats. If you have clean water, you have dragonflies and the smaller damselflies.

They come in a variety of colors. In the Great Marsh of Concord, Mass., we found a dragonfly that looked like it was red, white and blue. In the Franklin Parker Preserve in southern NJ, in the heart of the Pine Barrens, we found a very large dragonfly that was bright red. We're still trying to identify it.

Usually we find such exotically named creatures as 12-spotted skimmers, white-tailed skimmers, green darners and ebony jewel-wings. There is a state dragonfly association and several Internet sites devoted to field guides and identification. This one even tells you how many different types can be found in each county of New Jersey. In my home county of Morris there are 125!

Like the dragonfly I'm just skimming the surface here. But I am becoming as interested in their colors and diversity as I have been on birds for over a decade. Like the butterflies, these seasonal winged wonders can be easily overlooked, and that is unfortunate.