Some Maine Pics

We drove up to Mt. Desert Isle in the rain, and the first day looked like this.

Today we took our traditional first hike, up a hill called Beech Mountain. Lovely views from the top. 

Me and two of my sons.

My favorite part of the Beech Mountain hike is the descent through what I always think of as the valley of ferns and moss.

Then this afternoon I went out on a sea kayak with my son Robert, and he took this pic of mother and baby harbor porpoises. We also saw a seal and many birds.

Shadow dragon. You may be thinking that a dragon could not hide its body behind that skinny tree, but you are forgetting that dragons have eldritech powers and can pass between worlds with ease.

Nature Adapts

Bird's nest in Ukraine made largely from discarded fiber optic drone cables. (Source)

Signs of Spring

First daffodils, morning and afternoon. Below, frog eggs down in the mill race.

First Flowers of Spring

I don't know these folks manage to grow crocuses; deer eat mine down to the ground as fast as they come up, and I never see a flower. But I was thrilled to see these today.

The Storm

Major storm along a thousand-mile front in North America yesterday. It was weird here because a lot of our precipitation fell as sleet despite it being very cold. So we had about 4 or 5 inches of soft, fluffy snow, and then about 3 inches of ice pellets on top of that, leaving us with a crusty mess that is very hard to walk in. The whole region is mostly shut down today. Above and below, the scene at our house last night.

And its going to be very cold all week, so none of this is melting for quite a while.

The White Tree

Some mornings when the dog and I reach the bluff overlooking the Patapsco River this one sycamore tree is lit up by the rising sun. I have tried many times to capture the wonder of this, but neither my phone camera nor my own skills are up to the challenge. But this sort of conveys the effect.

First Snowfall

Out in the predawn woods with Kidu this morning, watching him gambol in the still falling snow and marveling at the silent beauty of the world. There were no footprints but those of a few deer and a lone fox, no sounds but our footfalls and a gentle breeze. Wonderful. No pictures of Kidu because he never stood still, even once. I noticed that while I had trouble staying on the trail, he did not; four inches of snow did not interfere with his sniffing out where he and I had walked a hundred times before. Nor did it keep him from finding sticks that had sunk under the drifts.

And now with the sun out, a different kind of beauty.

Fall in Catonsville

Red Lightning Sprites above New Zealand

Tom Rae Photography, via the NY Times.

Home from Maine

One of the best things  we did on this trip was to walk around Little Long Pond, an area that used to be the Rockefellers' private estate but is now open to the public. We watched a whole family of loons diving together, although between the distance and the fog this was best picture I got.

View of the pond.

And of the lovely stream we followed for about a mile.

Amazing mushrooms in this rainy year.

Wednesday my son Ben and I kayaked over to a rocky islet called Folly Island. In a shallow spot along the landward side of the islet we saw lots of life, including a small eel, several small fish, and numerous hermit crabs.

Fascinating rocks on Folly Island, a shattered record of earth's cataclysmic past. With a bit of orange lichen.

Farewell view from Acadia Mountain.

The Baby Fawn

Yesterday around lunchtime a doe came wandering slowly past our house, right behind our back fence. Two of my sons and I went out onto the back porch to watch her amble by. Then we saw why she was walking so slowly: she was being followed by a fawn so young it could barely walk. They proceeded across the street. When a car approach the fawn tried to pick up its pace but it obviously could not move any faster than its stumbling walk. The little thing can't have been more than a few days old, and I wonder if this wasn't its first real journey. We were so entranced that nobody thought to take a photograph until he was across the street and its mother had already disappearied into some bushes. But trust me, this thing was tiny.

I consider this more evidence for my theory that our deer don't have their babies in the woods, where there are dangers like off-leash dogs and occasional coyotes. They have them out in the neighborhood, where dogs are safely leashed or fenced and the soft suburban people would never think to molest a lovely little fawn.

Two Days Outside

I didn't write much last week for a bunch of reasons, including fatigure from a very busy weekend and spending all of Wednesday and Thursday out in the field. This was a continuation of the monitoring gig I wrote about several times last year, along the George Washington Memorial Parkway in northern Virginia.

The road is being rebuilt, and as part of this project they are repairing a bunch of outfalls (places where pipes that carry water under the road empty out). You can see from this picture that some of the outfalls are in bad shape. The GW Parkway parallels the Potomac River and a good portion of it lies within archaeological sites. So the National Park Service, which owns the Parkway, has required that work on the outfalls within archaeological sites be monitored by an archaeologist. Including this one.

The subcontractor responsible for rebuilding the outfalls is a Spanish-speaking outfit called RBA. Speaking no Spanish, I sometimes have trouble communicating with their crews; usually at least one has passable English, but not always. One interesting incident happened Tuesday when four guys were carrying an erosion control snake into position. (Photo from last year to show what this looks like.) The snakes are full of mulch, so they are heavy, and these guys were carrying one about 30 feet long down a pretty steep slope when one guy's belt came undone and his pants fell down. He stopped, which led to a sort of chain reaction along the line, everyone being brought up short and one guy falling down. Then somebody said something that must have been hilarious, because they all started laughing uproariously while they tried to get their train started again, stumbling, bumping into each other, laughing so hard they sometimes doubled over as they worked their way down the slope. Quite the scene.

The foreman of this crew was a guy I think of as the Stump Hater. He hates stumps and spends what seems to me like crazy amounts of time removing all stumps from anywhere he is working. The only time during this project I ever rushed out into the work zone was to stop this guy from digging out a stump in an artifact-rich area where he had no business digging. So of course while he was cutting a sort of ramp across the face of the steep slope above the outfall he spent most of the time digging out four stumps. Watching this I kept thinking that I would have done this ramp differently and used the largest stump to buttress the downhill side of the ramp, but no. Since this was all up on the fill prism for the roadway, built in the 1950s, it was none of my business, so I just watched as he methodically wreaked his vengeance on all nearby stumps.

I spent my breaks exploring. This site was about 50 yards from a stream called Pimmit Run, which looks like this.

Just downstream from my outfall were the remains of a late 19th-century estate that was torn down when the parkway was built, including terracing, specimen trees, and a strange little fishpond.

I was fascinated by the patterning of the dead reeds along the creek, but it would take a much better photographer than I to capture the effect.

On my birthday I found snowdrops blooming; one of the great things about a late February birthday is that nature often celebrates the day with early signs of spring.

A red-shouldered hawk gave me a severe screeching when I walked too close, but it was in no mood to be photographed so all I got was this surrealist blob.

All in all it was two pretty good days.