1 Starlings were not only introduced to the United States, but also to South Africa and Australia. In each of these areas their numbers rapidly increased. Did they evolve in their new habitats? Are they genetically different from their ancestral populations? Read the answers here.
2 Did Guano Make The Inca The World's First Conservationists?
3 Fall has officially begun and now is the time when streams renew their food supply.
The next morning, our fourth day began with a slow ascent up to and over a Mt. Guyot spur. At Deer Creek Gap, Page heard then pointed out a male Blackburnian Warbler, his orange breast pulsing like a wind-blown ember when he turned toward the mid-morning sun. As the day warmed, a slow drift of white, fair-weather clouds floated single file over the Little Pigeon River drainage to the northwest. Near Ross Knob a Broad-winged Hawk whistled its piercing, high-pitched call while barely tilting a wing as it wheeled higher and higher on the rising, warm-air cushion of a thermal.
Late in the afternoon we turned onto the sidepath leading to Cosby Knob Shelter, home of the "huge bear." As we approached camp we noticed two fresh and highly conspicuous bear scats, exceptionally large bore and less than a hiking stick's length apart. The nearest one, super-sized and heaped high enough to trip small children, was larger than any we had ever seen. The second-piled to the size of a small cairn, enough to fill a child's beach pail-was larger still.
We assumed the crap cairns were the work of one really big bear doubling down on his territorial calling card. They were posted, easy-to-read, no-trespassing signs that said: "This is my territory, this is my shelter. All rights and privileges associated with said territory and shelter, including any and all foods or foodstuffs, are hereby reserved for the sole and exclusive hunger of the proprietor-the one and only mighty maker of these two plop piles. This visual and olfactory document is signed, notary-sealed, and enforced by the megafauna dimensions of these droppings and a size Pleistocene paw upside your head. Get lost or get bloody."
We shrugged our packs off in front of the shelter. As we turned to inspect its cleanliness, we noticed paper scrolled to fit a slot of fence link to the right of the door latch. "WATCH OUT FOR THE BEAR" was boldly printed at the top of the first of three large pages. We retrieved our packs, carried them inside and began to read. A young Texan named Daniel had spent the previous night alone at Cosby. Early in the evening, he hauled his pack with all his food and cooking gear down the open slope in front of the lean-to. He cooked a simple, one-pot supper and enjoyed the low slant of sunshine still clearing the trees. A few moments after he set his pot aside to cool, an "incredibly huge bear" swaggered slowly downslope, woofing and tooth popping, blocking the rookie backpacker's straight-line retreat to safety. The young man made a short, adrenaline-fired run around the bear and back uphill to the shelter. He neglected to grab his pack before the half-circle sprint.
His meal had obviously cooled enough for the "500-pound thief"; the bear wolfed it all down and licked the pot a good 20 feet further downhill. The beans-and-rice dish tasted like more. The bruin immediately turned his appetite to the pack, sniffing and clawing, biting and ripping and rifling until he had devoured all the remaining grub including five big Snickers bars wrappers and all. After both food and bear were gone, Daniel reclaimed his ruined pack and returned to "Fort Cosby." That night the marauder padded back and forth beside the shelter's fenced front at least a half dozen different times, sniffing and pacing and all but growling "more Snickers."
The self-described novice backpacker had planned to hike the AT for another three or four days after exiting the park. But now, with his food supply gone down the bear's gullet, his pack trashed, and his spirits lower than his boot liners, he would walk to Davenport Gap with a light pack and empty stomach … and head home.
By the next morning, his youth had distilled the previous day's ignominy and anger to optimistic reflection. The last two lines of his lengthy post script read: I'll be back next year, smarter and stronger. Daniel L., Beaumont, Texas.
We investigated the crime scene. All that remained were a few scuff marks, some gooey-looking shreds of Snickers wrappers, and a couple of half-chomped baby carrots. We walked back to the bunker, keeping the door open for dignity's sake, and read the shelter journal to gain whatever advantage we could from the bear's habits and temperament. An unlikely pattern quickly emerged. The beast, always alone and very big, "was one seriously bipolar bear." Nearly every day before signing their trail names-Zen Bootist, Heyduke, Hemlock Hank, Hot (herd of turtles), Limp-along Cassidy, and the like-the AT backpackers described the bear they came to call Fat Albert one day, Cosby the next. Fat Albert was always characterized as "big but tentative, unaggressive, nervous, a mild-mannered beggar, an easily run off loiterer." Cosby was consistently described as "a huge King Kong bear, monster-beast bear, mega-beast bear, the biggest bear I've ever seen, a bad-ass alpha male on steroids, 450 to 500 pounds and every ounce a bully, etc."
On Cosby days, which received the lion's share of the ink, the bear was a woofing, false-charging, jaw-popping intimidator, who would quickly misappropriate all unfenced food for his immediate use. No journal writers boasted of driving the Cosby-day bear completely off, not even one of the rock throwers. He left when he was good and ready, after all the food had been forted up for the night behind the chain-link fence. On Fat Albert days, however, loud yells and clanging pots and pans were all that was required to run the big but skittish bear down to the edge of the clearing.
The swinging pendulum good bear-bad bear routine had begun in April. Throughout all of the entries, there was but one bear-alternately docile or demon, one night mousy, the next night mean. The bipolar bear theme occurred so regularly that a few of the contributors began a small war of potshot words, accusation followed by escalating rebuttal. One gadfly upped the ante by suggesting that Cosby nights were caused by Fat Albert campers.
After finishing our day's ration of gorp, we headed down to the nearby spring to filter a gallon of cold cooking and drinking water. Three-quarters through our fourth and final Nalgene bottle, Page grabbed my pump arm and said, "bear" in a voice low but tense. An impressively large male bear stood at the bottom of the clearing-silently watching, head slightly raised, nose working the air. I glanced back at our packs inside the shelter; Page had closed and latched the door on her way out. Good move.
Brown muzzle, skull flat on top between his cupped ears, the bear looked to his right toward the other side of the opening for a second, then quickly returned his gaze to us. His impassive brown eyes, seemingly too small for his bucket-sized head, gave nothing away like a good poker player. But the tilt of his round face and his tensed body and his mind behind those inscrutable eyes were all alert. I stopped pumping and studied our visitor, tried to read his body language for clues to his identity, Cosby or Fat Albert.
"What do you think, Cosby or Fat Albert?"
"That's a big bear," I said, "but he looks a little nervous and tentative to me. I think our mooch for the night might be mousy bear Fat Albert."
"Yeah, I think so too."
The black bear advanced a couple of yards, stopped, looked over his shoulder, tested the breeze again. Eyes firmly fixed on the imposing bear, I finished pumping while Page gathered up the filter bag and full bottles. We decided to postpone supper for half an hour, enough time, we hoped, for him to leave. The bruin we wanted to be Fat Albert shambled forward, but did not closely approach the shelter, and did not pace back and forth in front of the fence demanding power bars in exchange for peace and quiet. If we were reading him right, our bear du jour was Doctor Jekyll, meek and mild and easily run off.
I watched as Al slipped away like a large puff of black smoke blown through dense foliage and dark shadow. We took a half-hour snooze as planned. The bear was still out of sight when we arose from our rest. Less than a minute after we started supper, a large male bear reappeared at the bottom of the clearing, just to the right of center. At first he just stood there, head raised and hesitant, looking about uneasily, drawing large drafts of air through his moist black nostrils. Trying to see what was for supper with his sense of smell. Before we verbalized our thoughts, that our beggar was still mild-mannered Fat Albert, he abruptly scooted to his left along the lower edge of the opening without apparent cause for his skittishness.
We scanned the woods. Down and to the left, still 10 feet in the forest, the shelter's secret loomed large in the double circle-single image of our binoculars. An older male bear-longer, heavier, and higher at the shoulder than the first-shuffled toward the opening and bear number one. He was well upholstered and huge for a Southern Highlands bear, big and burly and black as an obsidian boulder. We didn't need binoculars to read his mood; it was as unequivocal as a cocked pistol. He entered the opening with a slow muscular strut. The exaggerated roll of his shoulders and sway of his massive head declared that he was the real deal, the dominant bear. His size and demeanor guaranteed us he was about to drive off beta bear and take charge of all holdups and handouts the shelter offered. We now knew the source of Fat Albert's uneasiness. It was the journal's "monster-beast" Mr. Hyde, Cosby. He was a physical force. He made us grateful for strong steel.
The two black bears engaged in a territorial skirmish along the bottom of the opening only 25 to 30 paces in front of our see-through shield. They were fighting for the right to ransack our packs if given the split-second chance. We felt like we were participants in one of those public television nature shows: two spawning-run salmon anxiously watching two Kodiaks fight for sole possession of their pool. Winner take all.
The ultimate outcome was never in doubt. Alpha bear's bulk and his slow, cocksure physicality convinced us he would quickly rout beta. But to our surprise, Fat Albert held his ground, unwilling to yield any more turf a second sooner than necessary. Head lowered and swaying in rhythm with his slow, flat-footed strides, Cos narrowed the distance. Albert's feet remained motionless, but his head and heart weren't ready for battle. His body began a sideways wince. Making a great show of woofing, grunting, and jaw chopping-all bluff and bluster-Cosby closed the gap to a little more than his length, then paused, providing Al ample time to play his part in their dance of known dominance. Beta blinked, submitted. He cowered down and further sideways, muscles tightly bunched, ready to spin halfway around and sprint. Alpha male false charged, hurling his bulk and mock ferocity toward the empty space where Fat Albert had been, stopping with little hops on his front paws.
Heavyweight bear number one disappeared into the long darkening shadows of the sheltering forest. Sumo-weight bear number two turned his back on the subordinate bear, possibly an ursine insult, and rumbled back into the middle of the ring, claiming victory for the fatherland of his incessant hunger. And waited to see if he had won a white-towel TKO. But when he finally swiveled around to check the continuance of his success, the contender was back in the lower right corner of the clearing, in the exact same spot as before. Round two. Cosby lowered his head and locked eyes onto his opponent the way a bull signals a charge. He moved in much faster this time and false charged with a laborious gallop as soon as he closed. Al cringed down and sideways again, clearly showing submission and his intent to scram, which he accomplished with an astonishing speed and agility that belied his usual lumbering gait.
King Cos suddenly funneled his anger and frustration into a classic display of displaced aggression: a hard-wired explosion of red-hot ferocity intended to intimidate without actual combat or injury, at least to bears. The dominant male wheeled and charged in quick bursts of fury. He whirled and whacked all the target-appropriate vegetation within range in a stunning exhibition of speed, agility, and big-stick power. He popped shrubs and small saplings like they were speed bags, hammered larger saplings like they were heavy bags. He battered them all into bent or broken submission with surprisingly fast blows thrown in combination from both of his long-clawed front paws. His combustive rage, an innate choreography rehearsed and honed over geologic time, was quickly spent.
Cosby did not strut back to the middle of the ring immediately after his show. This time he stood near the forest's edge, blowing hard from his exertion and staring in Albert's direction. Aggressive mega-beast glared at what we assumed was mild mega-beast for a long moment before slowly moving back to the middle of the lower part of the clearing, once again claiming the shelter and its attendant rights to all the grub he could beg or bully.
Fat Albert had to thumb his nose one last time for dignity's sake; after all, how hard could it be to slap some flimsy and defenseless foliage around. But he fooled no one. He had probably witnessed the same spectacle: an awesome flaunting of assault-weapon firepower. Round three would lead to ripped flesh and blood if Cosby caught him, and he with all his old black bear culture and knowledge knew it.
The challenger nonchalantly shuffled back out into the opening, but not as far out as before. The champion tensed with promised violence. He was through with all courtesies: all tooth-popping posturings, false charges, martial arts attacks against supple flora. He rocked back slightly and took off, legs pumping, without bluff or sound. Fat Albert didn't bother with cringing submission; he hauled freight to save his hide, a rushing black blur, front legs stretching out low to the ground like a chased cat's. Cosby pursued him through the forest's parting green curtain and out of sight. The alpha male's speed reinforced unsettling knowledge: bears are easy to underestimate, impossible to outrun or outfight if one really wants you, an unarmed human, for an easy meal.
After several minutes the victor was back in the lower part of the opening, suddenly appearing-as even large animals so often do-as if he had popped up from the Earth. I tied the horseshoe-shaped latch down with a rope so he couldn't knock it back up, inadvertently or otherwise. He approached the shelter. Our trust in the strength of the wire weakened as he advanced. Bad boy Cos stopped 6 feet from the fence. The reverse zoo effect was now overwhelming. He stood there, a silent and watchful wall of muscle, his emotionless brown eyes concealing his cunning and stealth and proprietary willfulness. He looked right at the cold supper between us, sucked in its bland scent, then turned and walked away, familiar with the futility of the fence.
Up close, King Ursid of Cosby Knob Shelter appeared as big and bulky as the journal accounts claimed. Already familiar with black bear weights provided in various mammal guides, and familiar with fear's exaggeration, my guess was lower than most in the shelter journal. I guessed he weighed between 450 and 475 pounds. But it was just a guess and it was just June. A fall-fat Cos could easily weigh well over 500 pounds by October if the year's berry and hard mast crop were plentiful.
The night now officially belonged to Cosby. Our new larger and far more aggressive raider rumbled into the shadows, but remained in sight. When we looked up from our meal a minute later, he was gone. No movement, no sound. The forest had closed the door behind him. We relaxed, but only slightly. We figured he was still down there in front of us, his nose on high alert and scenting for the slightest hints of new food. But for all we knew, he could be behind us, waiting to bluff the mobile buffets off the backs of late arrivals.
A little before seven, a tall, slender young man pulled up to the shelter and unshouldered his pack. We told him everything he needed to know: the Texan, the journal accounts of the bipolar bear, the territorial dispute. His calm questions and thoughtful comments betrayed only a slight concern, not much more than a realization that his cooking and movements had to be tempered with good judgment.
James, who was section-hiking the AT two weeks per year, told us he had skipped Tricorner Knob Shelter and had passed a heavily loaded northbound hiker-a middle-aged man, immediately unfriendly-about 3 miles back. He asked if the man had stayed with us at Tricorner Knob the night before. We told him everyone we had met, both northbound and southbound, had been friendly, and that we hadn't seen the man he described. The three of us now knew one thing about the surly man: he either came up a sidetrail or was making bootleg camps in the woods along the AT.
(Continued next week)
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| Wheel Bug, a type of Assassin Bug. The semicircular projection on the thorax is characteristic of Wheel Bugs. (photo by Catherine Chastain) |
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| A crop of the photograph above, to show the piercing beak beneath the head. |
Earlier this week (Sept. 26) a Nature Rambler, Catherine Chastain, sent me a photograph of a Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus), taken on her back door. Her son, Nathan, a budding entomologist, carefully picked it up. Nathan knows that Wheel Bugs can deliver a painful bite with their sharply pointed beak, visible under the head in the enlargement above. It takes a brave and knowledgeable person to handle these creatures. This short video shows many details of the living insect.
A Wheel Bug is a type of Assassin Bug, (family Reduviidae). It is the only Assassin Bug with a semicircular "hump" seen on the top of the thorax. All the Assassin Bugs are predators on other insects.
Click here to view a series of macro photographs by Debbie Roos. She has photos that show the adult, the eggs, the process of hatching and the young nymphs.
The nymphs are black, except for the abdomen, which is a bright orange/red. In animals a prominent red color is often a warning signal that indicates that noxious or otherwise distasteful properties. Some insects with prominent red markings are simply mimicking those that are distasteful or dangerous. Many of the true bugs, including the Wheel Bug, have glands in the thorax that produce foul smelling substances. That is how the Stink Bugs got their name.
I once kept a small jumping spider as a pet, feeding it a variety of small insects that I caught in my backyard. On one occasion I offered it a red and black Wheel Bug nymph and watched as the spider stalked it. The spider crept closer and closer and finally leapt upon the nymph. Almost as soon as it came in contact it jumped away and began grooming, as if it was trying to remove some irritant. The following week I placed another Wheel Bug nymph in the spider's cage. Normally the spider would immediately begin stalking potential food items, but it never showed the slightest interest in this Wheel Bug. That single encounter in the previous week seemed to be sufficient to train the spider not to mess with Wheel Bug nymphs Unfortunately, I couldn't find a non-noxious, red insect to see if the spider was avoiding anything red.
Reference:
University of Florida Entomology Department Featured Creatures.
We have another multi-part story by Tim Homan.
The big news this week is that our poet laureate, Bob Ambrose, will be presenting poems from his work, "First Genesis, a Modern Telling." The reading will be on Word of Mouth, Cincinnati, via Zoom. Here are the details:
1 Poetry Readings for Word of Mouth, Cincinnati (via Zoom)
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Zoom room opens at 6:00
Poetry readings begin at 7:00
Featured reader – Bob Ambrose: "First Genesis, A Modern Telling"
(~7:15 to 7:40, after the first set of open readings).
Zoom link.
Fungal items:
2 I'd like to recommend an entertaining and informative book about fungi: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake. If the Nature Rambler book group were still meeting, I would suggest it. It's well written, accessible and wide ranging. Here's a link to the author's website where you will find lots of short "blurbs" from various sources.
3 A leather-like material made from fungal mycelia. Can it replace real leather?
4 An article from the New York Times Magazine about
people's relationship with mushrooms, real and imaginary, filtered
through the imagination of artists. My reaction was "WTF is this about?" Your reaction may vary.
Not a fungus items:
5 Don't miss this video! It's about Slime molds, organisms that were formerly thought to be fungi, but now are recognized as a kind of unicellular protozoan (now called protist). Being unicellular they lack a brains and nerves but can actually learn! It's a Nova program and is available streaming from PBS and you can get it on your computer directly from PBS. Nova:
Secret Mind of Slime.
6 A movie, My Octopus Teacher, about an intimate relationship that develops between an octopus and a human is available on Netflix. Wonderful undersea photography.
7 All hummingbirds engage in torpor overnight, lowering their body temperature. But how low can they go?
Climate change:
8 What will the climate be like where you live in 40 years? A county by county projection for the entire USA, plus interactive graphics show the national picture. Hint: the Dakotas are looking good.
9 Sea level change will displace millions of Americans. Where will they go and what effect will it have on our country?Migration of people displaced by rising sea levels.
How climate change will reshape America.
Miscellaneous FINE Things:
10 What caused a large die-off of birds in New Mexico:
11 Scientists use seaweed to travel back in time.
12 Amazing lichen diversity discovered in Alaska:
13 Honey bees forage for pollen and nectar over a 5 mile radius of their hive. Native bees don't range nearly as far. Could honey bees impact native bees? (15 min. video)
14 A profile of the Red Cedar tree in BC, the people and the future.
15 A caterpillar that mimics a snake when threatened.
16 An imaging technique that dramatically shows how endangered a species is."The more pixelated the image, the closer it is to extinction," the artist explains.
by Tim Homan
In June of 1989 Page and I took a belated and shortened honeymoon-a four-night backpacking trip in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park*. Because of her father's death and our subsequent care of her mother, we hadn't backpacked-or done much of anything-for over a year. We reserved shelters for the 31.0-mile stretch of the AT from Newfound Gap to Davenport Gap. The night before I printed, "Just married: Need Ride to the Appalachian Trail at Newfound Gap" on a large piece of cardboard.
We drove without pit stop or pause through the mid-June morning to Davenport Gap. We strapped on our heavy packs and began walking the dirt-gravel road, hoisting our hitchhiker thumbs and boldly lettered sign at approaching vehicles. Our message worked almost as good as a shuttle car; sightseers hit their brakes and backed up to give us lifts, always asking where and how far we were hiking. One woman in a bus-sized Winnebago asked, "Aren't you afraid of bears? I know I would be." Our fourth ride dropped us off at Newfound Gap, where the AT crosses US 441 at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line, late in the morning.
(Continued next week)
1 Finish reading Tim Homan's adventure, Temporarily Misplaced Part 2.
2 I usually restrict these links to just nature-related items, but I'm making an exception today. In the midst of this pandemic I found a simple pleasure in the Netflix series Midnight Diner. Each episode is a half-hour. The series is set in Tokyo, in Japanese with English subtitles. The diner of the title is a simple one-counter, one cook operation that opens at midnight and closes at seven am. The menu offers only one item, but the mysterious proprietor, known only as "Master," will make any dish asked for, if he has the ingredients. There are over a dozen customers that drop in from time to time and each episode focuses on one or two of these regulars. The stories are simple and sentimental. Food plays a role in each small drama and most episodes end with a brief cooking tip. In the words of the Master: "If you don't clean the mussels, the soup will be sandy."
Watch two or three of the episodes to see if you like it. Watch this short video review to get a sense of what the show is like.
3
Cicada choruses are winding down now, but these are not the so-called
"periodical" cicadas. The choruses we hear in late summer are ordinary
cicadas that make an appearance every year. Periodical cicadas emerge in
enormous numbers every 13 or 17 years, depending on where you live. This website
has extensive information about periodical cicada life history,
including emergence maps and years. You can use that information to plan a
trip in late spring/early summer to personally experience an emergence.
Next
year (2021) the 17 year periodical cicada is scheduled to emerge in
North Georgia. The last emergence of this brood was in 2014 and people reported their presence in Union and White counties, so be ready in April or May to witness a rare natural event. Here is a great video
documenting the life cycle of the 17 year cicada. It captures the
feeling of the emergence better that any other I've seen. It's
almost like being there.
4 And now, for something completely different. Part 1:
A short documentary about the Victorian art of arranging diatoms.
5 And now, for something completely different. Part 2:
A short documentary about lichens and a lichenologist:
6
One trait thought to be possessed only by humans is learning from other
individuals. But it seems that homing pigeons can learn from more
experienced birds. Read this report of a UGA professor's research written by science writer Elizabeth Penissi.
7 With the human population increasing and the amount of suitable land for agriculture decreasing the need for a source of protein in the near future is a given. Some has suggested that we switch to insects as a source of protein, but this doesn't seem acceptable at the present time. Another source that has been promoted in recent years is aquaculture. Haikai magazine has a series of five articles on the possibility of aquaculture as the solution to this problem: "Big Fish The Aquacultural Revolution." (Please note that I am not advocating, pro or con, aquaculture; I'm just calling your attention to the variety of options that are possible.)
8 Wildfires are sweeping through the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the loss of lives, property and timber, these fires are burning down forests of mushrooms
9 Jan Coyne sent this link: Comedy Wildlife Photography awards 2020 finalists - in pictures
11 Has anyone seen an Overcup Oak? If so, let me know where it is.
That's it for this week.
by Tim Homan
In the years 2000 and 2001, when I researched and wrote a hiking guide that included the Southern Nantahala Wilderness, I frequently postponed the real work of writing by studying the wilderness map. For a relatively small area the two-state wilderness (1) is unusually rich with place names, boundaries, a well-known ridge, a major hydrologic divide, our country's first long-distance trail, 5,000-foot peaks, even a reference to the prominent honker of a Revolutionary War general: Pickens Nose. There was much to make a willing mind wander. Over and over again, I procrastinated by reading the rugged land's contours, tracing the trails and long ridges, following the blue-line flow of the high headwater rills down to their respective rivers, or fantasizing about bushwhack routes, my imagination eagerly striding the land with no thought of dark green and glossy discouragements of rhododendron.
This pocket-sized parcel of the Southern Highlands, approximately 23,365 acres and still puny, is steeped in evocative place names reflecting the weave of natural and human history: the rugged Appalachian landforms, the abundant wildlife and the magnificent forests that once animated the mountains, the rough and hard-labor lives of the early European settlers. A reminder that these ancient and eroded mountains are still a formidable geography, still plenty big and tough going for a person afoot on untrailed slopes.
Here the Appalachian Trail closely follows the equally famous crest of a multi-state long and winding ridge, the Blue Ridge, as the heavily trod treadway threads its white-blazed way alongside and through the wilderness. And here in this small protected sanctuary of the Mountain South, where congress has granted the land a provisional deed to its own life, the Blue Ridge serves double duty as the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest.
A careful scan of the wilderness map leads to another fact: all four of the Southern Nantahala's highest peaks raise the horizon to over 5,000 feet in North Carolina's northern and higher-elevation half of the two-state wilderness. These four mountains-Standing Indian, Big Scaly, Ridgepole Mountain, Little Bald-stand over or close to a mile high as the southernmost 5,000-footers in the Appalachian cordillera, which automatically qualifies them as the southernmost mountains of that height in eastern North America. Standing Indian, the site of a former firetower, is the tallest of the four; its final touch of sky rears up to 5,499 feet. The lowest 5k peak by the slim margin of only 10 to 20 feet, Little Bald's highest thrust of ancient orogeny, approximately 5,045 to 5,050 feet, is just over 0.4 mile above the Georgia border. The bald's southernmost 5,000-foot contour line is only 0.25 mile north of the Georgia-Carolina line, giving it clear title to the southernmost terrain over 5,000 feet in height of any mountain, knob, bald, ridgepole, or Standing Indian in eastern North America.
After all the idle hours of map study, I decided to hike off trail, bushwhack, in the Southern Nantahala Wilderness someday soon before I became too decrepit. I also decided to climb Little Bald on my first backpack trek. The other three five-grand peaks all had trails leading right to or closely approaching their highpoints. Little Bald was the only one that offered the challenge of hard off-trail hiking.
In the spring of 2005 I asked hiking buddy Roger if he wanted to join the ascent of Little Bald. (Roger is Roger Nielsen, a former, and hopefully future, rambler.) I showed him how our route stepped up in pitched rises of contour lines pinched tight and dark on the wilderness map. I told him we should work our way up to Dicks Knob-a very high peak for Georgia, one that few people have planted their boots on-along the line of march to Bear Gap and Little Bald. I guaranteed him strenuous hiking up a wild reach of rough country, wildland walking that would test the want to of our wills. I also guaranteed wildflowers, total solitude for our group of two, a heightened sense of adventure and discovery, and bear-clawed logs at the very least.
I called the Chattahoochee National Forest's work center in Clayton, Georgia, and talked to an old timer. I told the woodsman what we wanted to do and asked him about the thin dashed line on the quad map: the one leading from the parking-area end of FS 54 up to the Appalachian Trail at Coleman Gap. He told me the line was an old single-track that had not been legally used by motorized vehicles since the area received wilderness designation back in 1984. The former road, at least for the first mile or more, was still open enough to walk if you didn't mind the sun-gap saplings and the unknown but growing number of deadfalls.
He also told me how we could begin our trek. We could follow the woods road for maybe a mile to a small stream, a Coleman River feeder clearly shown on the topo map, and a former wildlife opening before turning to the left just before the branch. Then we could follow an old logging road, probably grown over, for perhaps a quarter mile to the high end of a former timber sale where the road petered out. After that we would be on our own, have all the bushwhacking we could want or stand.
Since he had helped me and worked for the federal government, he felt compelled to offer a short CYA disclaimer. "I hunted up there when I was a boy and worked up there for the forest service. That's rough country up there where you're going, a fair amount of rock in places, cursed with rhododendron in others. That rhododendron will snatch the hat off your head, damn near pick your pocket. Easy to get lost, hard to get found again."
Someday came on May 21 and 22, a weekend so we wouldn't have to take off work. Roger and I drove north on US 441 beneath an overcast sky, the ceiling low and completely closed with the medium gray of socked-in cloud cover. The weather forecast had called for gradual clearing, but as the two of us traveled west on US 76 from Clayton, we drove through light rain. At the empty parking-area end of dirt-gravel FS 54 (2,860 feet), the clouds floated higher and lighter gray, giving us hope the called-for clearing was on the way.
The low-elevation forest was lush and shady, full of small buzzings and birdsong. The extra-large leaves of the deciduous saplings invading the edges of the former road's light gap were wet and dripping from the recent rain. Roger and I followed the former single-track as it entered the zoned wilderness and ranged north on mostly easy uphill grades. Dense vegetation crowded our frequently curving line of least resistance in places and occasional deadfalls blocked easy passage as expected, but overall the road was still remarkably open for one closed to vehicular traffic twenty-one years before.
Early on, we had quick looks at two colorfully feathered wood warblers-hooded and black-throated blue-and heard the insistent song teach teach teach of a third, the Ovenbird. The two of us heard the loud and fiercely ringing Tarzan tremolo of the crow-sized Pileated Woodpecker, one of the wildest voices left in the Southern Mountains, twice before our first pack-drop break. A single showy orchis bloomed beside the track, its bicolored orchid flowers a deep pink hood over a white landing-strip lip.
We turned left off the woods road at the small branch and former opening. The autumn olive shrubs planted for wildlife were still growing beneath the gathering shade of the 6-inch-diameter tuliptrees quickly reclaiming the clearing. After some scouting and thrashing around, we found the old logging road, grown over to a faint path through the monocultural recovery of more tuliptrees.
Roger and I passed through the young stand into a much older and far more diverse forest of mixed mesophytic hardwoods, not a conifer in sight. Now there was no single-track, no cleared and beaten path bisecting the forest into right side and left side. The sun-seeking grace and ancient symmetries of the forest surrounded us on all sides, making us feel swallowed up and small on the mountainside. The novelty of increased difficulty and danger intensified our focus, added a kind of excitement missing when a footpath tells you where to go and where to place your feet to get there.
We were no longer on the map's landscape of contour lines and imagination. We were now cross-country backpacking, traveling trail-less through sharply slanted mountainous terrain with only maps and compasses, looking for the easiest seams through the forest along our desired route. Our sense of entering a wilder and more challenging phase of the trip was palpable.
The clouds brightened even more, gave us expectations of blue-sky gaps soon. We were both in bouyant moods, happy to be out in the big untrailed woods, our senses ratcheting up to meet the demands of tough hiking. Roger and I decided to gain a few-hundred feet of elevation by climbing up the steep hardwood slope to the west-southwest before bending our ascent toward the notch of a hollow. We stopped for a breather beside a rotting log ripped apart in places by the long claws of a black bear, the deeply incised parallel lines signs of the wildness we were seeking.
The sky cleared; we could now see blue and brighter white through the canopy gaps in the forest. We plodded up the formidable sweep of the green mountainside, steering around the dark and dense barriers of rhododendron. Roger and I entered a scattered colony of flowering flame azalea, then turned so we could contour toward the hollow's ravine. As we curled around the head of the hollow, we flushed a tall doe out of her day bed. She took off with a loud snort and bounded down the slope, her tail flipping up to full white flag, waving goodbye with every leap.
We passed through that rising sweet spot in spring's surge up the slope. Higher up, the leaves of the trees were still unfolding, not yet fully grown. Down below, the leaves were already grown and darkened, already marred from caterpillar munching. But we were now walking through that ephemeral and upwardly mobile band of freshly unfurled foliage, spring's first full blush of pastel green, newborn and pristine.
Around the hollow we changed course so we would strike the spur we wanted where the top of its fold was narrow enough to form an obvious ridge. The two of us crested the ridgetop and angled toward a higher and more prominent spur. We gained elevation atop the slick footing of wet, moss-covered rock and roughed our way through a tightly knit snarl of rhododendron to a reward: another bear-raked bole, the gap between claw marks wider than the one before. We found the ridgecrest we wanted where our spur met another to form a single well-defined keel rising toward Dicks Knob. The ridgeline led us up into cloud mist, the dim and gauzy gray half-light making the crosshatched mesh of the heath-shrub hells appear even darker.
We followed a narrow game path past several small patches of pulverized soil, the roto-tilling work of feral hogs. (2) We flushed a rabbit and spooked a Red-tailed Hawk into flight in quick succession. The fronds of finely wrought New York and hay-scented ferns offered welcome easy walking where the contour lines spread further apart.
Roger and I climbed the final 400 feet of the calf-buster grunt up the knob's sunrise slope: no trail, no trash, no game path, just the sharp green rise of rarely trod land. We zigzagged up short switchbacks of our own design to lessen the difficulty of the pitch and to avoid slabs of wet rock. Below seeps we waded nearly knee high through the exuberant growth of herbaceous plants. Near the end of our slow ascent, we noticed the curling, yellowish-silver bark of a yellow birch, a cold-adapted northern hardwood, a sure sign we had entered the Mountain South highcountry.
We shared the knob's tiny topknot (4,630 feet using the newest topo), our first major waypoint, with a colony of Catesby's trillium, their three-petaled flowers having already turned a darker pinkish red with age. Using our packs for pillows, we lay down in the thatch of last year's leaves and rested for half an hour, a great luxury of peace and pleasing fatigue.
Break over, our bushwhack continued down the easy gradient atop the main ridgecrest barely east of north. That high fold stretched north-south across our small squares of laminated topo map and connected Steeltrap Knob to the south with Dicks Knob and Bear Gap and Little Bald to the north. A few hundred yards downridge from the mountaintop, Roger and I heard a large animal tear off from us at close range, just the other side of the circular wall of opaque mist murk. The animal made far too much racket smashing through the shrubs for it to have been a long-legged and graceful deer. No, the critter we walked up on and spooked to sudden panic was thick and powerful and built low to the ground, probably a feral hog.
The distance from the knob's highpoint to the middle of the saddle was only 0.4 mile on the flat map, and the wide spaces between the 40-foot contour lines told us our downgrade to Bear Gap might be relatively effortless. But after an easy beginning, the interlaced limbs of rhododendron kept jungling together at the leading edge of our portable round of visibility. Parts of the keel were so completely cordoned off with impediments we thought we were fighting our way through a partial heath bald. The latticed braches of the tall shrubs snatched the hats off our heads repeatedly.
Our almost-over-the-hill team gradually ramped down from the mist-shrouded mountain to the lowest sag of the gap, 4,420 feet and only 0.1 mile on the map from the North Carolina border. Roger and I rigged up A-frame, lean-to tarps for lightweight shelters, snacked and rested on our ground cloths. And waited for the mist to clear.
To be continued next week.
Notes
(1) North
Carolina, Nantahala National Forest, approximately 11,732 acres;
Georgia, Chattahoochee National Forest, approximately11,633 acres. The
Nantahala N.F. holds title to approximately 594,456 acres.
(2) Since my first Southern Nantahala hike in 1985, I have seen only
four free-running swine-a pair and two solos-in the wilderness. All
four lacked humps, had very short black hair, and possessed the
keg-on-short-legs, porky pig build of feral hogs. None of the hikers I
have chatted with over the years had observed wild boar phenotype swine
in the wilderness.
FINE Things No. 11
Red leaves on the ground . . .
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| (photo by Emily Carr) | |
fallen from the sky above . . .
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| (photo by Emily Carr) | |
Calling warblers.
The tree in the photo above is a Black Gum (Nyssa sylvatica), one of the earliest canopy trees to change color. Some think the early leaf change makes the fruits more conspicuous for migrating birds.
Linda has visited the power line and reports that Goldenrod, Ironweed and Frostweed Wingstem are in full bloom this week. She met Richard Hall on her walk and he told her that he had seen migrating fall warblers.
Here are your links to Fun, Interesting, Novel and Entertaining things for this week.
1 Seeds of Magnolia virginiana.
2 Penn State videos on different aspects of pollination. A collection of 1 hr + videos on bee keeping, bee diversity, bee biology. We have many of the same kinds of bees, so the programs are applicable to Georgia.
3 When will we get a vaccine?
4 Study Finds Painting Eyes On Cows' Butts Can Save Their Lives.
NPR segment audio.
5 The peopling of South America - when did humans first arrive in South America?
A condensed version.
And a longer version.
6 A deep-rooted prairie mystery by The Prairie Ecologist, Chris Helzer. He takes a fresh look at prairie vegetation and explores what we know, especially about their root systems. You'll be surprised at what you thought was true is actually probably false, or, at least, unknown.
7 Jumping insects: Plant hoppers, Tree hoppers, Leaf hoppers on video in ultra-slow motion.
8 The Animal Origins of Coronavirus and Flu
9 Can Vaccines for Wildlife Prevent Human Pandemics?
Don't care for my selections? Let me know what you'd like to read about or watch and I'll try to find something FINE.
by Tim Homan
Later, the sky promising with large patches of blue, we decided to complete the ridgecrest climb to Little Bald's crown only 0.6 mile away as we would walk it and a little over 600 feet higher in elevation. We carried only water, snacks, fanny packs, and overconfidence, dressed only in shorts, gaiters, and T-shirts. We did not pack any survival gear: no headlights, no warm shirts, no space blankets, and no ponchos or rain jackets. Both of us probably had a lighter or two in our fanny packs.
A short distance above camp, we noticed a large-dollop plop of place-name apropos scat deposited close beside a faded Budweiser can (the only human spoor along the bushwhack segment of our hike) with two small-caliber bullet holes, probably from a .22. The scene looked choreographed, like the bear had marked his territory next to the littered beer can, one signpost of passage beside the other. Less than 30 yards further, we walked past a small colony of Catesby's trillium blooming close to a fairly thin, flat-sided rock the size of a large platter. The rock had recently been turned over by the incessant hunger of a foraging bear, leaving its sunken imprint right beside its new position. Two sets of easily remembered pairings-bear scat and beer can, trillium colony and bear-flipped rock-would signal our return to shelter and supper.
We made steady progress and quickly crossed North Carolina's unmarked boundary. An animal path bisected the length of the ridgeline like on the other prominent crests we had trekked earlier in the day. The new leaves of the oaks, which were not fully grown in Bear Gap, became even smaller-small as mouse ears-as we ascended the upper slopes of Little Bald.
The two of us gradually curved to the west without knowing we had done so and were soon on top of the former bald without taking any compass headings as planned. Highcountry-hardy broadleafs and evergreen heath shrubs had reforested the mountaintop since it was last used as a summer-range pasture. Small scattered areas of the summit were tufted with doghair stands of deciduous saplings: a jailbreak of early succession growth filling in the former opening's light gap. The nearly level highpoint had no cairn, no rock outcrop, no view, not even an old fire ring. We sat down and tanked up on water and snacks. The sky sagged down and smothered us in cloud-belly mist before we began our backtrack.
Roger and I waited to determine if the mist-wrapped mountain was the result of a single cloud cutting an upside-down furrow across the bald's pate. It wasn't. We followed a compass heading east before turning to the right and south onto what we hoped was the right ridge. Nothing looked familiar. The thick gray fog whittled down our visibility to a small moving bubble, blotted out all landmarks: ridges, slopes, hollows, everything. Our sightlines were pitifully short. We followed the top of the fold down into the forested mist. Somewhere, while making end runs around the usual hindrances, we slid off the ridgeline and slanted onto upper slope. We were now trudging east-southeast almost diagonally across the contours of a sharply canted mountainside.
We stopped to study our small squares of laminated map. We talked out our problem. If we had dropped off the left side of the right ridge, the one leading to Bear Gap, a bushwhack west would take us back to its crest and camp. But if we had taken the wrong ridgeline, the wide and less distinct one running nearly southwest away from the bald, we would need to travel east or southeast to regain the correct ridgecrest.
We studied the grain and gradients of the respective sidehills. We decided to keep descending the veiled pitch of the slope toward what we hoped was the bottom-most notch of a hollow. Roger was wearing a watch; we knew there wasn't time for befuddling circles or even a single faulty decision. We traversed a slope mined with heath shrub skirmishers and seepage-slick rocks. I thought about what the forest service man had told me, but kept his warning to myself. We slipped and slided to slow-motion falls, but kept popping up and angling down into a forest gone darker gray. Fatigue and the first clench of dread, kissing cousin to fear, sapped our strength and focus.
The two of us frequently huddled around map and compass, steadying ourselves with calm consultations. We tried to right ourselves with first one plan then another, but all of our plans fell flat on the fact that we were temporarily misplaced, that we really didn't know where we were with a 100 percent certainty. Our compasses and maps and guts were telling us we were west of the Bear Gap crest, but we were unwilling to bet a cold and hungry and wet night out in the unsheltered woods without absolute confirmation. Not yet, anyway.
The lay of the land remained a cloud-buried mystery. But we did have one arrow left in our quiver: a spring-born rivulet, a high headwater rill of the "Creek" (3) labelled on the left side of our maps, began in the hollow just across the Georgia line on the west side of the crest we wanted. The east side did not show a stream, and it did not show a high hollow that might give rise to a spring. We decided to work our moveable eye in the mist down to the beginning branch and take a compass heading on its flow. Both of us wanted the clincher, we wanted to right ourselves on the map before spending the last of our light and energy climbing up the steep slope to a ridgeline.
We didn't panic. But the two us were increasingly concerned and determined not to make another disorienteering mistake. Roger was worried, but he remained outwardly calm, perhaps steeling himself for a long and uncomfortably cold night. We zigzagged down the sidehill generally to the southeast, so that we would strike the strongly tilted bottom of the hollow we hoped was down there in the gray void closer to Bear Gap.
Daylight kept draining away, dimming to an early and ever darker dusk. I noticed my tongue was sticking to the roof of my dry mouth and that it was difficult to swallow. My scant saliva had the odd metallic taste of a copper penny, primitive fear now the taste on my tongue. I pinched my forearm hard and told myself, once again, that I had to get Roger out of this mist-bedeviled mess. We needed to find our bullet-hole and bear-scat ridge with unerring accuracy, and we needed to start climbing toward that ridge within ten minutes or it would be a very long night.
We struck the bottom of the hollow's furrow; it descended south-southwest, about 210 degrees. That heading matched the map. Good, really good. Hot meal good. Now we needed to know if the hollow gave rise to the rivulet on our map. Our almost-whipped team shadowed the sharply falling notch. If we were right, we would be traveling in the correct direction, parallel and to the west of our tarp-strung camp. The bushwhacking was rough-steep, rocky, and wet-rhododendron alternately friend or foe, handhold or shackle. Increasing exhaustion and resignation made us clumsy. We thrashed through the vegetation down and down until we found a yellow Georgia Wildlife Management Area sign facing north. We were standing on the state line. That fact gave us a boost; we were in the ballpark, had a chance for a dry camp and the welcome warmth of sleeping bags.
Roger and I stumbled down the hollow a little faster, the darkening sky a ticking time bomb of "if-only" recriminations and grim prospects. We found the spring and tracked its outflow just far enough to get a reliable compass reading. The trickling run of the rivulet matched the thin black line on our maps: south-southwest and seaward, close to 210 degrees. We had our proof. We had finally deciphered the landscape; we had finally fixed ourselves on the map. Now it was time to move with all the resolve we could muster. I made a quarter turn to the left and climbed up the slope a vegetation-altered version of east. Roger called out for me to remain within easy shouting distance, a reasonable request. I hollered OK and pushed on as hard as I could, stopping only for standing eight counts. I heard Roger engaged in the contact sport of rhodo wrestling below me in the fast-fading light.
Reinvigorated, we crossed over the rocky ledges of a short spur and continued up and generally a little south of east. We hooted and hollered to stay in voice contact with each other. I turned more to my right so the hiking would be easier, and the ridgecrest would come down to meet me. Less than 200 yards after changing direction, I topped a ridge descending south through a small pocket of open hardwoods like the one we had passed through just after setting off for Little Bald.
I quickly found a familiar sight: the small colony of flowering Catesby's trillium next to the recently flipped-over rock. I trotted down the backbone of the ridge to find the clincher: the bullet-holed beer can beside the big pile of bear plop. I let out a loud celebratory whoop, hurried back up the easy rise of the ridge and told Roger we were back at camp. We stepped under our tarps safe from a miserable night with less than ten minutes of increasingly marginal light left.
We celebrated our deliverance with supper-desiccated dinners-and kept up a cheerful banter, stress leaving our bodies with every laugh. I told him about the metallic coppery taste that had taken up residence in my mouth, dread and fear come to say hello. He told me about the constricted feeling in his throat that had tightened as the minutes ticked toward last light. I told him I was glad he had held his emotions in check, that he had passed the bushwhacker's stress test. I also assured him, if he wanted to go again, that we would not make another mistake the rest of the summer.
Dusk darkened to cloud-cover night while we waited for our freeze-dried feedsacks to rehydrate. We could see the minute droplets of the heavy mist in our headlights. A light rain pattered on our tarps after we had slipped into our sleeping bags.
As I lay in my fart muffler safe and warm, I had a powerful feeling that Roger and I were the only backpackers for miles around. The black sky and the silence, no sounds save the occasional rain tapping on the tarps, buttressed the strong sense of our far-reaching isolation. All our effort to reach Bear Gap the first time, and all our struggle and stress to find it again before nightfall further bolstered that feeling of an expansive isolation. I knew the reality of our location. But I also knew the psychological distance felt much further, spanned miles and miles further in all directions.
We slept the sleep of the just, the just done-in and dog-tired. Late that night, some time on the morning side of midnight, coyotes startled us with a loud yipping alarm-their singing high pitched and piercing, close and quickly over. They had been working the ridgeline on the hunt, padding down toward the saddle from the north, when they had run right into the sounds and sweat-drenched scents of our camp. The coyotes had hit the brakes and sounded the alarm, their music a welcome wildness to the night.
The coyotes kept us awake long enough to notice that our breaths now plumed smoke, a visual to accompany the audio of our snores. The night was now cold and wet enough for us to know. …
Notes
"the Tennessee Valley Divide, which dramatically changes the destinations of the drainages to the south and north of its narrow crest." South of the divide, the Tallulah River's clear and cold water makes its short and dam-stoppered way to the Atlantic Ocean at the seaport city of Savannah.
North of Standing Indian, the Nantahala River's fast moving freight begins its long-expedition journey from grits to gumbo. Pushed and pulled along by the Earth's one-way water shepherd, the Nantahala's contribution glides down the Tennessee and the Ohio before mingling its mountain water with the Mississippi. After sweeping its meandering, mile-wide way far to the south, the Mississippi gains its lowest and final level where it ends at the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. There the mighty river loses its name, loses its linear traveling life, and loses its sweet water to the salty sea.
Place names from the Southern Nantahala Wilderness: Sugar Cove, Cherry Cove, Burnt Cabin Cove, Milksick Cove, Stillhouse Cove. Milk sickness came from a rhizomatous perennial known as white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum). This native Aster family plant is poisonous, and milk from cows that grazed this wildflower will cause milk sickness in humans, an especially serious affliction for young children. During periods of the nineteenth century, milk sickness was the leading cause of death in the nation.
Mayapple Knob, Little Nell Knob, Newt Knob, Deadening Knob, Rattlesnake Knob. When Southern Appalachian settlers found land flat and fertile enough to farm, their first step in the laborious process was girdling all the trees, killing them to let in the light. These girdled-tree areas were known as deadenings.
Whiteoak Stamp. Stamps and stomps, former sites of corralled livestock, are occasional to uncommon place names throughout much of the Mountain South, especially in the high land of former summer pastures.
(3) The spring that gave rise to the rivulet we followed to verify our bearing is the highest headwater source of Mill Creek, a tributary of the Tallulah River.
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| Left: An immature Loblolly pine cone; Center: Pine cone stripped of scales and developing seeds; Right: Two scales from an immature pine cone that were removed by a squirrel in an effort to eat the seed. (photo taken 8/26/2020, Dale Hoyt) | |
This summer the section of the Orange Trail by the river was re-routed to avoid several dangerously eroded spots on the river bank. The new route is further inland and includes a boardwalk over the marsh and an observation platform.
This new section of the Orange Trail begins below the Scout bridge and traverses the lower end of what Nature Ramblers call the "beaver marsh" and then continues through the woods to the power line right-of-way. All the following photos (except one) were taken by Emily Carr.
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| Entrance to the boardwalk from the woods side. You can see a little of the platform ahead on the left. |
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| Here is the observation platform. |
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| Another view looking toward the observation platform. |
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| This section is from the platform toward the start (or end) of the boardwalk at the Orange Trail. |
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| Broad-leaved Arrowhead with an inflorescence. | |
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| Staminate (Male) flower of Broad-leaved Arrowhead. The yellow parts are the anthers, the pollen containing structures of the stamens. | |
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| Pistillate (Female) flowers of Broad-leaved Arrowhead have green centers that are the fused pistils. | |
Monoecy is a condition that promotes outcrossing. Some populations of Arrowhead go to a further extreme: they are dioecious; all the flowers on an individual plant are the same sex.