THE NATURE OF THE PLACE

On the Flora and Fauna of the Adirondacks

EDWARD KANZE

Essex, Connecticut

An imprint of The Globe Pequot Publishing Group, Inc.

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Essex, CT 06426

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Copyright © 2025 by Edward Kanze

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ISBN 978-1-4930-8563-7 (paper: alk. paper)

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Slow down, you move too fast,

You got to make the morning last . . .

PAUL SIMON

FOREWORD

It would be accurate to say I enjoy Ed Kanze’s writing, or I would like to take a hike with him, or his knowledge of natural history is encyclopedic; but more revealing, I would like to be him. Yes, this book is a compendium of Adirondack flora and fauna, but it is more. It is about place, history, family, friends. It takes natural history from being not just the subject of a guidebook, but a personal experience. Nature is no longer something strange one sees “out there.” It is integral to community, the observer’s community.

It may be presumptuous of me to recommend how you should read this book. But I suggest that you shouldn’t read it from cover to cover like you would a novel. Nor should you use it as simply a guidebook. When you see something in nature that raises your curiosity, go to The Nature of the Place, find the chapters that focus on those things that you observed, read, immerse yourself in a better understanding of the critters and plants, and join Ed in a conversation about the community that surrounds us

Ross Whaley

Past Chairman, Adirondack Park Agency; Former President, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse; and champion of my home place and his.

INTRODUCTION

“The trouble with people today,” the renowned Adirondack guide Les Hathaway (1862–1952) said, “is they’re so busy coverin’ ground they ain’t got time to notice what’s on the ground they’re coverin’.”

I’m with you, Les. Even the Adirondack Mountains, tucked away in the cold snowy northern reaches of my home state of New York, are susceptible to health and fitness fads, the current one here being racing up and down peaks, ticking them on a list and, in many cases, seeing little or not a damn thing until you’ve climbed all forty-six declared by the original nineteenth-century survey to have summits 4,000 feet or above. The marked trails and unmarked “herd paths” (I’m not making it up—that’s what they’re called) that lead mobs up the peaks in question suffer from erosion and overuse. Pristine wild mountains that used to see few visitors now receive steady streams of them, all because of their position on a list. Lately the fad has spread to the Saranac Six (six formerly quiet peaks near the village of Saranac Lake) and the Tupper Lake Triad (three once favorite climbs of mine near the village of Tupper Lake).

Read our generally fine local newspaper, and you encounter one story after another of people scaling our forty-six so-called “high peaks,” some of them in record time. Last I knew, the speed prize went to a man who, with the help of a support team, hauled his ego up the forty-six in three days, five hours, fifty-two minutes, and zero seconds. Add to this sort of thing all the running races, skiing races, snowshoe races, bicycle races, and annual Ironman competition in Lake Placid (a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and full 26.2-mile running marathon, completed by individuals in a single day), and you get the picture. As old Les Hathaway rolls in his grave, people speed through Adirondack wild places faster and in great numbers than ever before, transforming the biggest park in the Lower 48 into a sort of open-air gymnasium.

Not for me, thanks. With due respect to dear fast-moving friends and family members who demonstrate great fortitude in, and take enormous pleasure from, traversing landscapes in their own fashion, I’d rather get to know the place.I like to think this place is not all about humans, our fitness levels, and how much of the map we can make superficial claims to have covered. My forebears and I have been growing old and dying here for more than 200 years, but that’s nothing compared to the bears and the beavers and the snapping turtles.

This book is an invitation, an invitation to slow down, smell the roses, and get to know fellow earthlings with more long-standing claims to this landscape than we have. They, and not the Iron Men, are the real heroes here. They forge lives in a hard, cold place that would defeat most of the living things that might try to live here. And they do it without woodstoves, central heating, internal combustion engines, and electric cars. Theirs is the real internet, a web of life that weaves together an almost infinite number of threads into a fabric that’s a wonder to behold and something close to a miracle in a largely hostile universe.

In these pages you’ll meet a selection of those threads, including the big charismatic animals of the Adirondacks, the black bear and the moose. You’ll encounter little creatures, too, all of which lead fascinating lives while nearly all of us ignore them: tiny fish that live in exquisite mountain streams where nobody tries to catch them; freshwater sponges, neighbors of the tiny fish; bryozoans, also called moss animals, which are microscopic colonial creatures and far better known from the sea; the infuriating and almost invisible biting insects called no-see-ums; centipedes; millipedes; and earthworms. There are stories here, too, about an orchid that pays a steep price for its rough treatment of bumblebees; plants so desperate for nitrogen they’ve taken to catching animals and eating them; poison ivy and the reasons why we might want to exchange our dislike of it for love; and a common wildflower that goes through serial sex changes. Loons, owls, falcons, eagles, and songbirds that pour out effusions of apparent ecstasy are here, along with much about bob-cats, foxes, snowshoe hares, beavers, and flying squirrels. Snakes, frogs, salamanders, and big predatory fish make appearances also, as well as fungi that produce light in the dark, bacteria that manipulate the atmosphere to their own advantage and cause rain and snow to fall, and giant beavers. While I hope every story in this collection has things serious and valuable to teach, humor slips in at irregular intervals to keep the mood light. At least I hope it does. A few pieces toward the end are offered largely, but not entirely, for laughs. One thing I hope you won’t find in this book is a paragraph that puts you to sleep, unless you’re in desperate need of rest.

I began work on this project in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic. The work was nearly done when the notorious virus’ Delta variant began turning the world upside-down all over again. The relevance of the latest pandemic for present purposes is that in the midst of the crisis, people began rediscovering their inner naturalists. Crowds of them—grandparents, parents, kids, aunts, uncles, same-sex couples, opposite-sex couples, and even a few singles—came to the Adirondack Mountains like never before. To my delight, a great many of them wanted to go for walks with me. There I had the pleasure of learning that the human fascination for nature is alive and well, and indeed, people are hungry for contact with wild things and the wild places where they live.

In these pages I write about my home place and my neighbors. A small fraction of those neighbors are human. My wife, Debbie, and I have lived in the Adirondack Mountains, year-round, for coming up on twenty-two years, ever since we hung up National Park Ranger uniforms for the last time at Acadia National Park at the end of September 1999. We bought a house in desperate need of rescuing and in the middle of our reclamation project, in our mid-forties, had the great good fortune to produce two healthy children. Those adventures are told in my book, Adirondack: Life and Wildlife in the Wild, Wild East (SUNY Press, 2014).

Since coming here to stay, I have had the privilege of writing stories about the fauna and the flora for various publications. The main ones that have published my work are the regional magazines Adirondack Explorer and Adirondack Life and a variety of newspapers in southern New York and western Connecticut. The newspaper pieces began before I lived here and were published under the banner “All Things Natural.” They ran without a break for just short of thirty-three years. In that space I had the privilege of publishing more than a million words. Favorite editors and favorite readers still keep in touch.

The volume in your hands gathers material, extensively revised and rewritten for present purposes, from two sources: Adirondack Explorer and “All Things Natural.” For the most part, the pieces from the Explorer have not reached the attention of my longtime readers in the New York City metropolitan area, where my newspaper column reached a diversity of eyes, and the essays penned for newspapers have not reached most of my Adirondack readers. And so, I’m hopeful that this collection contains more than a little that’s fresh and new for everyone. And because of the universal interest in nature and wild places and the enormous surge of interest in life in the open air spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope these words resonate far beyond my own beautiful, beloved, biologically vibrant neck of the woods.

PART ONE

THESE HAVE HAIR

1. WHITE-TAILED DEER PERSONAL ADS

Years ago, a colleague of mine, eager to jump-start his love life, began placing and answering personal ads in a newspaper. Let us just say that they led in interesting and sometimes shocking directions. Adirondack white-tailed deer seek relationships in similar fashion. They place their own personal advertisements, of a sort. Other deer answer them, a certain amount of jousting and mating goes on, and the following June or thereabouts, does deliver fawns.

For whitetails, the courting season begins in earnest in early fall. That’s when testosterone levels rise in the males. Bucks that were downright sedate all summer, fixated mainly on food, begin to engage in what appear to be mock battles with sapling trees. Generally, the bigger the sapling, the grander and more powerful the buck. Where antlers push against a trunk, bark is rubbed off. These abrasions are known as “buck rubs.”

Bucks create rubs about the same time that the velvet, or fuzzy skin, that covers antlers as they grow begins to tatter. As bucks continue to work out on young trees, the last bloodstained bits of velvet fall away. Further rubbing polishes the antlers, and scent is left on the trunks.

Does, reading the nuances of the woods like some of us scrutinize newspapers or Facebook pages, take note of buck rubs. Their hormone levels rise in autumn, too. By examining and sniffing these telltale signs of the season—the first salient personal ads of the whitetail rut—does learn about the bucks that made them.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Meanwhile, as a whitetail buck, urged on by testosterone, engages trees in combat, his neck muscles grow bigger and stronger. His expanded neck may partly be a result of the hormones themselves and partly a response to increased exercise. One way or another, a stout link between head and torso helps a buck prepare for what follows: male-on-male conflicts, which involve lots of butting. The stronger his front end, the more likely a buck is to come out ahead in a shoving match.

Another white-tailed deer personal ad is the scrape. This is a bare patch on the forest floor, raked clear by a buck with his front hooves. He chooses the spot, which is almost always under overhanging branches (more about those in a moment), and paws the ground until soil is exposed. Then he positions himself over the scrape, squats, and, to use a polite term, “makes water.” He also makes a minor mess of himself in the process.

In this way, a buck washes scent from tarsal glands, located on the upper insides of his hind legs, down to the ground and into the soil. He is composing, in essence, a personal ad. This one might be translated, roughly, as follows:

“Strong handsome male, sure to be a good father (at least in the sense of passing on traits desirable in offspring), seeks strong attractive female for passionate short-term relationship. Leave response here.”

If you walk up to a scrape (mature bucks make dozens of them) and give it a sniff, you’ll detect an intense pungency rising from the ground. To a fellow deer, this bouquet delivers personal information loud and clear. Rival males take notice. And so do does.

Mature does visit scrapes and, with noses far more sensitive than yours and mine, gather information. Often, but not always, a doe lingers, anoints the scrape in much the same way its maker did, and posts a reply. The next time a buck makes a pass through that part of his territory, he reads the message with his nostrils. He may also pick up messages left by rivals. Bucks are not averse to publishing personal ads on each other’s groomed turf.

A doe also sniffs the branches above a scrape. While the buck cleared that particular patch of ground, he likely rubbed his forehead on twigs and sturdier branches that grew overhead. Between his eyes and just above them, a buck has glands that produce sweat and pheromones. The pheromones represent, in essence, yet another kind of personal ad, delivering or reiterating information to does about the scrape’s maker.

Find a scrape in the woods, as skilled hunters know to do, and look just above it. You’ll likely find broken twigs. They testify, perhaps, to the fervor of the buck that budged and battered them with his forehead. The twigs may be wet, even if the weather has been dry. Bucks often lick twigs in the process of scraping and scent-marking.

Does moving through the woods leave scents and messages of their own. Bucks, stalking them, take note. The news posted by females changes over time. First, it tells of prospective mothers not yet ready to step over the threshold of the whitetail’s impromptu version of matrimony. Later, as mature does enter heat, or estrus, generally sometime in November, the messages grow urgent. From this point on and for several days thereafter, does and bucks sleep little if at all.

Of course, it’s all for a good and wholesome cause. To maintain a population of beautiful, graceful deer in the woods, there has to be romance. And the romance must play out in the whitetail’s time-honored way—through placing personal ads. Big, dominant bucks and robust, healthy females post the most compelling messages, and they do most of the breeding. Twenty-eight weeks later, more or less, after the snows of winter have come and gone, generally between late May and the Fourth of July, fawns make their debuts.

2. THE ELUSIVE ADIRONDACK MOOSE

Tracks—big tracks—in the mud demanded our attention. A group of us were hiking into the McKenzie Mountain Wilderness Area, near Bloomingdale, when we looked down in astonishment. At our feet lay evidence of a horse-sized stalker, perhaps one approaching 1,000 pounds. In shape, the prints were cloven and looked like those made by a deer. But the length, breadth, and depth of these impressions suggested a maker the size of a horse. Any one print could have held the bowl of oatmeal I’d eaten for breakfast.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The horse, of course, was actually a moose, a beast every visitor to the Adirondack Park, and every resident, has heard about but few have seen. Perhaps the track maker had been the moose that neighbors of ours had chanced upon a few days earlier. It was a bull, recently parted from his disposable antlers. He had been wading up to his hairy chest and belly in a sun-warmed pond.

We never saw the moose that made the tracks we saw that day, nor did I get lucky on the one other occasion (up to that point in time) on which, in the Adirondacks, I had gazed into a similar series of footprints. As my Adirondack grandfather, a master of colloquialisms, might have put it, the world’s largest deer had skunked me.

Truth is, looking for a moose in the Adirondack Park in 2003 was like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Granted, the needle might stand seven feet tall at the shoulder, measure nine feet from the tip of its enormous nose to the end of its miniscule tail, carry antlers weighing more than sixty pounds, and bristle with hair. But the haystack is enormous—six million acres—and the needles are scarce. According to Al Hicks, then the wildlife biologist keeping track of moose for New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, moose numbers were likely rising at an annual rate of 10 to 15 percent, but the total count was still probably less than 200.

In the Maine woods, the situation was conspicuously different. Hicks suggested it offered a glimpse of the probable Adirondack future. In Maine, a few hundred moose used the twentieth century to good advantage, romancing themselves into a population of 29,000 or thereabouts. People saw moose often in Maine, collisions with automobiles were frequent, and a hunting season had been opened. Year after year, tourists crowded into the state to get looks at these appealing but ungainly symbols of northern wilderness.

My own most memorable encounter with the Goliath of eastern ungulates occurred in Maine. I relish the thought of repeating it one day in the Adirondacks. I was standing on the rocky shore of a lake deep in the woods. Suddenly branches snapped behind me. I glanced over my right shoulder and saw a cow moose breaking out of the trees. In her wake, nose-to-hindquarters, plowed a monstrous bull, the six-foot-breadth of his antlers slicing through the balsams. As I stood trembling, the two clumped past me, so close that I could smell their musky odor, which was almost pleasing. I had a camera with me and tried to take a photo. The long lens I was carrying had a minimum focusing distance of eighteen feet, and the moose were closer than that. Knowing I was in a dangerous situation, I spoke soft and soothing words, often a good idea in the presence of large and unpredictable animals. To my relief, they clumped away without incident.

How to increase one’s chances of glimpsing an Adirondack moose? I asked the human being perhaps best equipped to supply the answer. “First of all,” said Al Hicks, “the eastern half of the Adirondacks would probably be best. That’s where we hear about the most sightings. I’m thinking about the area around Speculator and Perkins Clearing, the east side of Lake George, the woods in Clinton County north of Loon Lake, and the Moose River Plains.” Hicks emphasized that a moose seen in a particular place today likely won’t turn up there tomorrow. Moose move. He told of an Adirondack animal that walked from the Adirondacks to Rochester. There the moose was darted and tranquilized and trucked west to Newcomb. After its release, the wanderer set off again. This time it walked and swam to Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada. There the Adirondack expat died and was identified.

Hicks told me the best time to look for a moose was very early in the morning, at first light. Ninety percent of the sightings reported to him are of moose crossing roads, so Hicks advised aspiring moose watchers to get out early, drive cautiously, and keep eyes peeled. “If you absolutely had to see an Adirondack moose,” he added, chuckling, “the thing to do would be to get in an airplane on a bright sunny day in early January, fly over timber company land, and look for areas of active logging. Moose are more easily spotted in cleared areas. Fly low, circling, looking for tracks. When you find them, keep circling until you see a moose.”

If you’re one of the lucky hikers who comes face-to-face with a moose in the woods, stand calmly and don’t approach. A moose isn’t an animal you want to frighten at close quarters. As you pause, staring, the moose may well do the same. In all likelihood it’s ruminating, in both meanings of the word. Let the moose size you up, note your scent, and tiptoe off when it’s ready. In the meantime you’ll probably find yourself agreeing with Al Hicks. “The moose is very dramatic,” he said, “a neat animal, a great asset to the Adirondacks.”

3. MOOSE IN WINTER

Given their sheer bulk, the wooliness of their dark winter coats, and the astonishing length of their shapely chorus-girl legs, one would expect moose to take northern winters in stride. So it may come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, to learn that the largest of the world’s deer struggles through the cold and deep snow just like the rest of us.

Size, certainly, stands in the moose’s favor. There’s an old rule in zoo-geography, Bergmann’s rule, which states that individual animals within a species tend to get larger the farther they live from the Equator. Canadian robins are bigger than South Carolina robins, for example. However, Bergmann’s rule doesn’t always hold. As the distinguished nature writer and experimental physiologist Bernd Heinrich has pointed out, the world’s smallest songbird, the golden-crowned kinglet, lives in some of the world’s coldest places, including the Adirondacks. Still, on the whole animals that live where it’s cold tend to be big. Bulk seems to offer an advantage at low temperatures because the bigger you are, the smaller the ratio of your surface area to core volume. The smaller the ratio, the less readily you lose heat.

So the moose is big, up to 1,200 pounds and more in the Far North, and approaching 800 pounds or so in our part of the country. How about its extra-extra-large fur coat? That’s a good thing, too. The moose wears long underwear consisting of dense fur that’s soft and fine. Over that it sprouts an outer coat of guard hair, coarse and straw-like in winter. If we were talking about house insulation, we’d say that those hollow hairs have a high R-value. These and the thick underfur keep the moose so warm that if temperatures rise too far, moose are forced to splash in water or wallow in snow to keep from overheating.

Which leaves the legs. Here lie the problems of the moose in wintertime. A moose has cloven-hoofed limbs several feet long that allow it to move through snow of moderate depth far more readily than a white-tailed deer can. Yet even for the lanky moose, there’s a limit. It’s reached somewhere around thirty inches of powder. Beyond that, a moose struggles.

And depth is only the half of it. The nature of the snow plays an important role, too. A moose does best in packed powder. But if there’s been a thaw and a refreeze, and the snowpack forms a crust, a moose can find itself in a bad way. In hard and brittle snow, gray wolves, where and when they’re present, sometimes get the better of a moose, especially if it’s old, sick, run-down, or all of the above.

Moose deal with snow in a variety of ways. They plow trails by walking back and forth over favorite paths. This makes the going easier. Hard-packed snow is what a moose likes best, although sometimes in areas where gray wolves and mountain lions prowl, loose powder may work to a moose’s advantage. A moose that stands six or seven feet at the shoulder has legs much longer than those of its adversaries.

Because moose favor packed snow, they are sometimes attracted to roads and cross-country ski areas. In such situations they pose dangers. To people unfamiliar with the big animals, a moose feeling threatened looks relaxed and easygoing. Typically, it stands still, looking nonchalant until the moment it strikes out with one of its legs. A kick is potentially lethal. If you ever meet a moose on a road or trail, keep your distance.

Like deer, moose often gather in so-called “yards” in winter. These are often located on south-facing slopes and in places where winds keep snow depth shallow. A moose yard often has twelve to fifteen animals in it. Good feed also helps determine the location of a yard. In winter, moose tend to eat a mix of hardwoods such as willow, poplar, ash, birch, alder, dogwood, viburnum, ash, and hazelnut and softwoods such as balsam fir, hemlock, American yew, white cedar, white pine, and white spruce.

The dietary needs of moose in winter are astounding. A single animal might consume fifty or sixty pounds of rough and hearty fare in a day. Food is consumed meticulously, one twig, bud, or evergreen sprig at a time. Moose have a couple of nifty tricks for acquiring winter meals. When the snow is deep, they sometimes kneel, front legs bent back on themselves. This gets their short-necked bodies down to where the food is. A moose will also straddle a sapling tree and walk forward, pushing the tree down as it goes and feasting its way to the top.

Since moose breed in the fall, a cow moose that’s pregnant eats for two throughout the winter. Prospective moms burn up stored fat more quickly than prospective dads, so they’re especially prone to starvation. Disturbances that force them to burn extra calories can prove fatal. And so, if you’re lucky to see a moose in the snow, admire it at a distance.

4. GONE YESTERDAY, HERE TODAY, GONE AGAIN TOMORROW?

Adirondack moose milk, moose yogurt, moose cheese, moose chocolate, moose ice cream, and low-impact moose-back saddle trips. . . . I used to lie abed nights, dreaming entrepreneurial dreams of moose-based products. Yet the prospects dim. Just when I thought I had a sure-fire formula for making a home-grown Adirondack moose-mint (more about this later), Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) wildlife biologist Al Hicks tells me to find another horse-sized animal to bet on.

Global warming is coming. Indeed, global warming, climatologists tell us, is here. And the moose, which reigns supreme in cold climates but withers in warm, may soon go back where it came from.

The dire prediction comes just three decades after moose started returning to the Adirondacks, wandering in from New England and Canada. Moose had vanished from the region in the mid-1800s, victims of overhunting, habitat destruction and perhaps disease.

According to Hicks, best-case climate-model scenarios predict a Philadelphia-like climate taking hold in our region over the next generation or two. If this happens, the state’s moose herd, which the state DEC says has grown to about 500 animals, will likely peak, decline and disappear.

Exactly why the moose flourishes in, and only in, the wreath of spruce, fir, birch and willow that wraps around the cold, snowy forests of the northern Northern Hemisphere remains an open question. Numerous factors come into play. Among them are the presence (and absence) of plants moose like to eat, which is to say, broadly, soft, mineral-rich aquatic plants in summer and a high-roughage diet of woody plants in winter; the long legs of the moose, which give it an edge over deer in snow; and the fact that a moose is large, dark and woolly. Thick heat-absorbing pelage serves the world’s largest deer well in cold weather. In warm, the moose’s coat inclines the animal to overheat. Parasites pose problems, too. They’re moderate in number in cold climes, but when moose head south, they pick up lots of hitchhikers.

The most lethal form a grim trio: a liver fluke, a tick that can infest moose in literally staggering numbers and drive them to rub off all their hair, and a brain worm known to science by the tongue-twisting name Parelaphostrongylus tenuis.

Sketched on paper, the brain worm’s life cycle looks like a Rube Goldberg device for self-propagation. Let’s begin our look at it inside a white-tailed deer’s brain. Here the parasite may reach three inches in length, but perhaps because of acquired resistance, it generally does little harm. When the alien matures, it sheds eggs into the deer’s bloodstream, which carries them to the lungs. The deer coughs. Up come parasite eggs. The deer swallows them and ships them down its GI tract, from which they emerge unharmed. Land snails make contact with the poop and pick up the parasite eggs. When a moose eats a plant with an infected snail on it, the parasites hatch out and head for the moose’s brain. There the cycle begins spinning anew.

Studies suggest that moose older than two years are relatively immune to brain worm but calves are highly vulnerable. Of course, without calves a population will crumble.

The thinking of Hicks and his DEC biologist colleague, Chuck Dente, is that the more mild our Adirondack winters become, the more deer we’ll have. The more deer we have, the more moose will suffer from brain worm, flukes and ticks. No biologist can predict exactly what will happen, and when. But the future for the Adirondack moose looks uncertain at best. Hicks says he wants to be optimistic. Like me, he’s the middle-aged father of young children. He’d like them to inherit an Adirondack Park, he says, that still harbors the hooved Goliath.

If the Adirondack moose does hang on, history suggests it might live up to my business plan. In Europe and Asia, moose nurtured by humans from their suckling days have made loyal, affectionate mounts and milking animals. Granted, they also kill a passerby with a well-placed kick, head-butt, or sideswipe now and again, but this is also true of horses and cattle.

According to biologist Valerius Geist, a cow moose can produce 440 pounds of milk during the four or five months she’s in season. The milk, says Geist, is considerably richer than the milk produced by dairy cows.

Today we chuckle at the idea of moose being anything but great gawky icons of wilderness. But Geist’s comprehensive and supremely readable Moose: Behavior, Ecology, Conservation (Voyageur Press, 1999) makes it clear that there’s more to the animal than meets the eye. “In the dense coniferous forests and bogs that cover much of northern Europe and Asia,” he writes, “a rider on horseback cannot outrun a rider on a moose—as Russian general Jermak Timofeitsch found out when he began the conquest of Siberia on behalf of Czar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century.”

Hicks ended our telephone conversation with a challenge. “Beat the drum,” he said. “Let’s get going and do all we can about climate change.”

Amen. And hey, anyone for a glass of moose milk?

5. A WILD CAT CHASE

Bobcats? Canada lynx? Mountain lions? Opinion varies widely in the Adirondacks regarding the status of these big wild cats, all natives of the region. Bobcats turn up dead and occasionally pose for photos and videos, so their presence is established. The other two are problematic. Some are underwhelmed by the lack of documentary evidence to support the presence of lynx and mountain lions. Others claim to have seen one yesterday—or they know a biologist or naturalist or DEC employee who has seen one, or thinks she or he has.

One thing is certain. Wild Adirondack felines must do what every North American carnivore needs to do: hunt, kill, meet, mate, raise offspring, retreat to a den in harsh weather, urinate, and defecate. None floats over the landscape like a hovercraft. Big cats leave tracks, lots of them, as they cover ranges stretching out over dozens of square miles, or hundreds. They leave other signs, too: scat, scrapes, kills, scratching posts, and more.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

As fallen leaves start to molder and snow begins to flutter out of the sky, it’s an excellent time to think about what wild cats we have and might have, and to get outdoors and seek evidence of their presence.

During the Adirondack winter, bobcats, which have relatively dainty feet, move and hunt with difficulty in deep snow. Look for their tracks in shallow powder, in light snow that lies on top of a hard crust, and along roads and well-traveled trails. All cats have retractable claws. It’s rare to find claw marks in bobcat tracks. Tracks of a bobcat’s size (about two inches or so long and wide) with claw impressions in them are likely the work of a fox, fisher, or marten.

Much of the winter diet of Adirondack bobcats comes from white-tails killed along the edges of communal gathering places, or deer yards. Even though a beagle-sized bobcat can kill a full-sized deer, long hard winters are hard on bobcats. Hunger sometimes drives them near humans and to stalk livestock and poultry.

The Canada lynx, believed by most biologists to be extirpated from its old Adirondack range, could possibly make its way here from Canada and far northern New England. When it does, or if it’s here already, the lynx, like the bobcat, will succumb from time to time to the temptation of attacking farm animals and pets. A lynx is woollier and more long-legged than a bobcat. It looks bigger, but its weight is nearly the same. When trying to differentiate between the two, focus on the feet. Bobcat paws are relatively dainty and similar to a housecat’s. Lynx paws suggest Ping-Pong paddles. They’re broad, richly haired, and handsomely adapted for walking on snow. In a bobcat’s tracks you can nearly always make out the individual toe-pads. In a lynx’s, the pads tend to be obscured or partly obscured by hair. A lynx track is just plain bigger, too—about four inches long and wide, which is to say nearly double the size of a bobcat’s. While a bobcat rarely moves through deep snow, a lynx travels over it freely, much like the snowshoe hares it hunts and devours.

As for the mountain lion (my favorite name for a cat with scores of them), if it lives in the Adirondacks or merely passes through, as one North Dakota male did not long ago on its way to a fatal 2011 rendezvous with a Hyundai in Connecticut, there will be tracks and other sign to be found. During the snowy months we should be on the lookout for wide-ranging prints traversing miles of territory. The tracks of adults measure more than three inches long and across, with the straddle, or width of trail, measuring between eight and eleven inches. The stride of a mountain lion ranges from about thirteen inches to twenty-eight, compared to the bobcat’s five to sixteen.

If you find cat tracks in the snow, and those tracks measure more than three inches long and wide, you may be on to something exciting. Take out your camera or cell phone and take pictures. Most of us don’t carry a yardstick or meter measure into the woods, so be sure to place something in the photo that you can measure later. Scale is vital if you want your discovery to be taken seriously. Photos that show stride (distance between tracks in the direction the animal is moving), straddle (width of the animal’s walking pattern), and the tracks themselves are important. If you find bits of fur or scat and can bag it, collect the stuff and bring it home.

Look for other markings, too. If you’re correct in judging that you’ve found cat tracks four inches or so long and wide, the animal that made them could have been a lynx or mountain lion. But there are differences to look for. Mountain lions sink into deep snow and often leave drag marks with their bellies and tails. Lynx tend to move on top of the snow and leave no drag marks.

If lynx and mountain lions really do roam the Adirondacks in the twenty-first century, they must be leaving abundant evidence to prove it. Let’s get out there, and if there’s proof to be had, let’s find it.

6. THE MISSING LYNX

Take a bobcat, stretch its legs, and draw out its ear tufts. Then pound its feet until they’re broad and flat, wash away most of its spots, and blow dry. Now the fur stands thick and fluffy. What have you got? Meet the animal biologists call the Canada lynx, or Lynx canadensis.

“The lynx,” wrote Clinton Hart Merriam in an 1884 monograph on Adirondack mammals, “is, and so far as I can learn, has always been, a rather rare inhabitant of the region. It is most often met with on the Champlain or eastern side of the Woods, but is nowhere common.”

Since Merriam’s time, the bobcat’s lanky boreal cousin has grown ever more scarce in Adirondack forests, perhaps to the point of nonexistence. The prime causes for the decline were suggested by a well-organized but ultimately unsuccessful 1989–1992 attempt by SUNY-ESF biologists to restore the population. Eighty-three adult lynx, relocated from the Canadian Northwest, were released. Automobiles killed many, some were shot as nuisance animals, and a great many crossed the Blue Line and kept on going. One walked all the way to Maryland. Biologists searched for lynx in the High Peaks in 1998 and 1999 and failed to turn up a single animal. Today, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) considers the animal extirpated in the state.

What have we lost? The lynx, still abundant across the spruce-fir forests of Canada, is a compact, solidly built cat adapted for hunting in dense woods and deep snow. A lynx looks bigger than a bobcat but weighs about the same, which is to say, around fifteen to twenty-five pounds. The heftiest weigh thirty-five pounds or more. The most conspicuous differences are the lynx’s longer legs, longer ear tufts, and snowshoe-like feet.

John James Audubon wrote that the lynx’s “toes [are] thick, so completely concealed by the fur that the tracks made in the snow by this animal do not show distinct impressions of them. . . . Their tracks are round, leaving no marks of the nails unless the animal is running.”

As we know from Merriam, Adirondack lynx were rarely seen in the nineteenth century, although in prehistoric times, when the mountains were colder and snowier than they are today, they surely abounded. Even Verplanck Colvin, the great pioneering surveyor of our mountains in the nineteenth century, may have never seen an Adirondack lynx. The only mention in his writings that I’ve come across appears in a speech he gave on January 4, 1876. Colvin described seeing the “large, bold foot-prints” of a lynx on the southern slopes of Mt. Marcy. The cat had been “rabbit hunting,” a deduction Colvin made after finding the footprints superimposed on tracks made by snowshoe hares.

The relationship between the lynx and the hare seems to be a close one. While predators are often said to be “keystone” species and lauded for controlling numbers of prey, in most situations biologists find that cause-and-effect actually works the other way. Prey abundance (or the abundance of relevant plants when talking about herbivores) regulates the number of predators. And so, as snowshoe hare populations rise and fall in a natural rhythm that may span nine to eleven years between peaks, lynx numbers go up and down accordingly.

We speak of “lone wolves,” but wolves are rarely alone. Solitude is much more a specialty of cats, the African lion a notable exception. Male and female lynx generally live apart except at breeding season in late winter. Then they court noisily, mate quickly, and separate. The kittens are born after sixty days’ gestation in spring or early summer. Blind and helpless at birth, they nurse for two or three months and stay with their mothers through their first winters. Trackers sometimes report evidence of a family of lynx hunting cooperatively, but this seems an exception rather than the rule. A healthy lynx, if it can avoid cars and dogs (which easily outrun them), may live ten to twenty years.

I’ve only once seen a lynx in the wild, and it was not far outside the Adirondack Park. One snowy day my wife, Debbie, and I were driving to Burlington, Vermont, to sign copies of my book Kangaroo Dreaming at a bookstore. Running late, we had no time for wildlife watching or anything except getting there. As we approached the causeway leading from Grand Isle to the mainland, on the road’s righthand shoulder, we spied a large, freshly dead cat, feet up. The animal was far too large to be someone’s beloved pussycat. It had prominent tufts at the ends of its ears. We tried to talk ourselves into it being a bobcat yet couldn’t. The paws were problematic and exciting. They looked like furry ping-pong paddles. I was tempted to throw the carcass in the back of the car so we could show it to someone official, but there was no time to spare. We drove off, talking of nothing else.

After dark, Debbie and I drove that way again, eager for a second look. It was not to be. The lynx was missing. Surely someone had made off with it.

While lynx are believed extirpated in the immediate country surrounding the Adirondacks, biologists know that predators roam widely, especially when mates are scarce and in winter when hunting grows difficult. It’s likely that from northern New England and from across the Canadian border a lynx wanders into the Adirondacks now and again. Will the cats ever return in significant numbers to breed and to feast on our periodically abundant snowshoe hares? Time will provide the answer. We hope we live long enough to hear it.

7. FINALLY, A BOBCAT

All my life I’d craved a good look at a bobcat. In thirty years of searching for them in the Adirondacks, as well as hunting with binoculars for the beagle-sized wild cats from Maine to Wyoming and Florida to Texas, I’d glimpsed the elusive, night-stalking prowler only twice. Each sighting lasted no more than a snap of the fingers. Just a flash of fur of the right size, shape, color, and pattern, and the cat was gone. I’d seen one twice, yes, but that was just a technicality. I hadn’t had anything close to a satisfying ogle.

On more than a dozen occasions I’d identified bobcat footprints, but as a tracker, I’m hardly an expert and struggled to trust myself. No doubt I overlooked bobcat tracks at other times, mistaking them for something else, and no doubt I also convinced myself that red fox tracks with little or no claw imprint were made by the Adirondack cat I desperately wanted to see.

Then, at long last, my luck changed.

I was laboring in an outbuilding, hammering out a piece of writing, when my wife, Debbie, shouted to me over an intercom. She was in the kitchen of our house, looking out the window while cooking dinner just before dark, and she was hyperventilating. “Ed, there’s a cat on the ground near the bird feeder. I’m not sure what it is. I think it might be a bobcat!”

From the nearest window in my studio 200 feet away, I could see, with the application of a little imagination, something larger than a big housecat, hunched over near the bird feeders. It was brown and hunkering over something on the ground. I craved a better look, so I tried hooting like an owl. The thing looked up. It was an animal, all right. I desperately wanted to convince myself it was a bobcat. Yet the light was poor and the distance great, and all I could tell myself for sure was “maybe.” I wanted to march over for a better look but knew I’d scare the animal off and ruin Debbie’s chance for a fabulous sighting.

Meanwhile, Debbie locked the intercom on broadcast mode and gave the play-by-play. Positioning herself in front of the kitchen sink because the window above the faucet looked straight out on the whatever-it-was, she explained that our son, Ned, then two-and-a-half, had joined her in the vigil.

Debbie said that the thing was definitely a cat, but too large to be a housecat. It was sandy brown all over, except for the face, where there were dark streaks. The ears were bigger than a housecat’s and ended in points. The fur seemed thick and woolly. For such a powerful-looking animal, the feet appeared surprisingly small and delicate.

Trapped in the studio, I knew even a creak of the door would almost certainly scare the animal away. Frustrated, I stayed put. “Deb,” I cried, after she’d restored two-way communications. “The tail, the tail! What about the tail?” Debbie did her best to examine the animal’s backside. This was easier said than done. The cat faced her, straight on, blocking any view of its rear. This was frustrating. A short, or bobbed, tail would have clinched the identification.

Debbie grew more and more excited. So did Ned. “Dada, a bobcat!” he said at least six times. By this time, Dada was feeling sorry for himself. At two-and-a-half, Ned was enjoying a view of a bobcat far superior to anything his naturalist father had achieved in fifty years of trying.

When Debbie and Ned told me they’d had their fill, I eased open my studio door and slipped out. Quietly as I could, I crept toward the bird feeder, one cautious step at a time. When I arrived, the cat had dematerialized. Debbie told me that it had lingered until I was a few feet away, then faded into the woods. Our Pontiac Vibe had blocked my view of its exit.

The bobcat, she explained, didn’t bolt. In making its escape, it sauntered. And she and Ned had seen what they needed to see: a naturally bobbed tail, the feature that gives North America’s most wide-ranging wild cat its name.

Luckily for me, this wasn’t the end of it. The following morning, I put out a tin of sardines. It seemed that sardines I’d placed in the vicinity a couple of weeks earlier, hoping to encourage visits by an ermine I wanted to photograph, were the lure that had brought the bobcat into view. Those sardines were now gone, so I put out fresh, aromatic ones. No sooner had I placed the fish in the snow and returned to the kitchen than Debbie began shouting.

I couldn’t make out her words. Didn’t need to. The excitement in her voice told the story. Hurrying to the kitchen window, my grateful eyes took in a bobcat, its powerful muscles (a bobcat, small as it is, can take down a deer) rippling beneath a generous coat of fur. Only a few feet beyond the glass, this native cousin of lions and leopards ambled along the path that leads from our woodshed to the kitchen door. Without meaning to, I’d spilled a little sardine oil directly beneath the kitchen window. This proved fortuitous. For twenty or thirty seconds, the bobcat paused to savor the fragrance and lap up the fishy snow.

There was a swagger to the cat’s walk when it started up again. It strutted to the south end of the house, then hooked left and east. Debbie, Ned, and I regrouped on the porch. From there we watched the bobcat pad down to the dead-end road we live on, cross a one-lane bridge over the Saranac River, and set off downstream along the north bank. Watching every stride, I felt such pleasure I could hardly stand it.

Why? The bobcat shouldn’t have been a big deal. The animals are relatively common. Unlike the mountain lion, whose sustained presence in the Adirondack Mountains is questionable, and the lynx, which seems absent but may wander in from Vermont now and again, the bobcat is a widespread, undeniable presence. Yet few see it. I suppose the bobcat may be more secretive than its larger, hungrier cousins and harder to spot as a result of its compact size.

Being difficult to get a look at undoubtedly helps explain why the bobcat hangs on in the Adirondacks while its larger cousins have vanished or nearly so. Early settlers felt threatened by 200-pound mountain lions, I suppose, in a way they never did by twenty-five-pound bobcats. It didn’t hurt, either, that bobcats were able and willing to capture and eat a wide variety of prey. Today, the modest home ranges of bobcats limit their contact with automobiles, and that, I’m guessing, also abets their lingering. Just knowing bobcats are out there, even if we almost never see them, is more than half of the fun.

8. WHAT BEARS WANT

In spring, when black bears wipe sleep from their eyes and crawl out of hibernacula, one would think they’d be monstrously hungry. After all, months have passed since their last suppers. They’ve been cooped up in rock crevices or jammed beneath wind-thrown trees, week after wintry week, hibernating or not hibernating (depending on which biologist you talk to), burning up body fat, with no woodstove or pantry for comfort. Upon emerging at the end of winter, it would seem natural that the first order of business for a bear would be scaring up a major feed—say, wolfing down a meal of frogs, or fish, or garbage, or a backpacker’s dehydrated beef stroganoff and granola bars.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Lou Berchielli, a DEC wildlife biologist who knows Adirondack black bears better than just about anyone, and who I had the pleasure of speaking with, told me the truth is otherwise. “They’re not really hungry when they come out,” he said, “unless they had a bad year and went into winter carrying too little body fat.” After a lean summer and fall, Berchielli explained, bears will sometimes emerge in spring and head straight for bird feeders or dumpsters or groves of beech or oak trees where they enjoyed their last big meals. “They have good memories.”

When a bear is ready to eat, its appetite leans in directions you might not imagine. Typically, the big carnivore heads for wet areas that turn green nearly as soon as the snow begins to melt. There it dives into a vegetarian smorgasbord of grasses, sedges, the buds of willow and ash, marsh marigolds, the roots of Jack-in-the-pulpit, and, if the bear lives in the Adirondack banana belt, skunk cabbage.

It seems odd that black bears, which are carnivores by ancestry, should spend so much time feeding on plants, but that’s the nature of the beast. In fact, all the world’s bears are largely herbivores. The lone, notable exception is the polar bear. It gorges on seals, the occasional small whale, narwhals, walruses, sea ducks, fish, and the occasional two-legged primate. A black bear has a formidable set of teeth, it’s true. But look at them closely and carefully, and you’ll find a set of chompers much like your omnivorous own. The carnassial teeth of wolves and dogs look like steak knives. Those of black bears are by comparison blunt.

What else do bears’ hearts desire in spring? They seek out beehives and, ignoring stings, mine them for honey, honeycomb, and caviar-like larvae and pupae. They raid wasps’ nests, too. I once watched a black bear dig up and devour a subterranean yellow-jacket colony. It was quite a drama. The bruin would charge in for the next mouthful, then retreat as the wasps jabbed it mercilessly around the lips and eyes. Then the bear would dart in again. It kept this up until an empty hole, a crater, yawned where the nest had been. Black bears also rip apart logs for grubs and, not averse to dining on red meat when it’s easily obtained, dig up mice and chipmunks. They’ll seize a fawn or moose calf if they can find it. What’s more, if opportunity advertises itself, a hungry bear will sometimes take a calf, pig, sheep, housecat, or miniature poodle.

Bears enjoy treats put out for birds, too. “Black oil sunflower seed may be the most favored bear food of all,” DEC wildlife biologist Ed Reed told me. Reed warned that bird feeders can encourage bears to come near human dwellings, which isn’t a good thing. Where bears are active, bird feeders must be taken down in early spring and not put out again until bears retire to their dens in autumn. Berchielli pointed out that the black bear is not an aggressive animal by nature, but when feeders, garbage, or other easy pickings habituate it to the presence of people, it becomes dangerous.

In summer, bears climb wild black cherry trees, just about ubiquitous in Adirondack hardwood stands. There they find comfortable limbs or forks on which to sit and rake in fruit-laden branches with their fore-paws and claws. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and huckleberries are also favored. In autumn, fatty protein-rich nuts such as acorns and beechnuts complete the job of fortifying bears for long, energy-sapping winters in their dens.

Sooner or later, a bear also thinks about romance, at least if it’s a male or a female without cubs. Berchielli says mating in the Adirondacks may begin as early as May or not happen until September. Seeking females, males will travel almost tirelessly, roaming within or beyond home ranges that may cover a hundred square miles.

What else do bears want? They need places to sleep. Berchielli says younger bears, which are more vulnerable to attack by predators such as coyotes and bobcats, tend to sleep up in trees, while older, larger bears will often sleep at the base of a tree on the ground. When the weather turns hot, a heavy coat of black fur becomes a handicap. Then a bear will scratch the soil bare and sprawl across it, cooling its belly on moist earth.

Wild bears tend to be most active in early morning and evening, sleeping much of the rest of the time. Bears living near humans often become night-active. It’s these bears that sometimes break into parked cars to raid coolers and perform Olympic-caliber gymnastics in order to haul down the suspended food bags of backpackers. You can’t blame the bears. Nature made them hungry, curious, nimble, and clever. As we do, they do what comes naturally to them—or unnaturally, depending on the circumstances.

As relative newcomers in Adirondack bear territory, with more lifestyle options, it’s our job to store food in secure canisters, take down bird feeders, lock up garbage, and do whatever else it takes to ensure life, liberty, and peaceful coexistence for all.

9. LOATHE ’EM OR LOVE ’EM: ADIRONDACK COYOTES

In the spring of 2000, my wife, Debbie, and I took up year-round residence on eighteen Adirondack acres. Naturalists, we immediately set about inventorying the wildlife. Among our first records were coyote tracks, marking a practical, energy-conserving course through deep snow. Not long afterward, on a spring night, we stood out in the cold, listening to a chorus. We’d heard coyotes yipping and wailing like that in southwestern deserts and in woods a half hour’s drive north of Manhattan, but taking in the concert from our own doorstep represented something new and exciting.

When I see or hear coyotes in the Adirondacks, I’m always reminded of my mother’s father, Burdett Brownell, longtime mayor of Northville, a village in the southern Adirondacks. “Grampy” trapped widely in southern Hamilton County in the 1920s and 1930s. Disliking competition in the woods, he had little appreciation for predators, yet I remember him speaking with tender concern about the “wolves” he used to encounter in the back country. They’d cut their pads on icy crusts, leaving trails of blood, and Grampy felt sorry for them.

Grampy enjoyed friendly debate, so as a smart-aleck teenager I didn’t hesitate to point out the flaw in his story. By the time he was running his trapline, wolves had been absent from the Adirondacks for a quarter century. I’d learned this from a book. “Bush-wah,” he’d say. “I saw them, plain as day.”

And so he did, I now realize. The animals were not, speaking in terms of likelihood because the evidence is long gone, gray wolves or eastern timber wolves. They were almost certainly “brush wolves,” which most of us today call coyotes.

The story of the eastern coyote, and the Adirondack coyote in particular, seems to change almost as often as the weather. In Grampy’s day (he died at seventy-three in 1978, weeks after I graduated from college), Adirondack coyotes were often called “coy-dogs.” Labeling the new arrivals hybrids between coyotes and domestic dogs held a certain appeal, especially for those eager to destroy them. Game laws protect full-blooded species but generally ignore half-breeds.

Eventually, scientists put the “coy-dog” out of business. Studies of captives showed that the animals bred true, meaning they produced offspring of generally uniform appearance, rather than some that looked like coyotes and others that looked like schnauzers. Behavioral studies showed that on the few occasions when coyotes and dogs hooked up to produce offspring, the bitches whelped in winter, the worst possible time for survival, the males failed to provide child support, and the hybrid bloodline was extremely unlikely to endure. More recently, DNA studies confirm an absence of dog DNA in eastern coyotes.

By the late twentieth century, Adirondack “coy-dogs” were widely recognized as genuine coyotes, which is what they had been all along.

Well, sort of. As many a biologist, hunter, trapper, and naturalist has suspected, the top dog in the Adirondacks today looks a good deal like a wolf. Coyotes I’ve seen on the plains and deserts of Texas weigh between thirty and forty-four pounds on average and feed mostly on lagomorphs, rodents, and carrion. Adirondack coyotes, by contrast, can exceed fifty or sixty pounds and feed regularly on white-tailed deer.

What then is the Adirondack “coyote”? According to Bob Chambers, retired professor of wildlife ecology and management at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), skull analysis shows the animals to be somewhat intermediate between typical coyotes and wolves. Even more suggestive, he said, tissue samples gathered from ninety Adirondack coyotes by hunters point to “ancestral connections with the Algonquin wolf type.” The relatively small wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, closely related to coyotes, are, according to Chambers, “essentially the same” as the red wolves that once ranged across the eastern forests of the United States.

Lovers of certainty howl at the hedging biologists do when talking about wolves and coyotes, but there’s no getting around it. The differences between types of wolf and coyote manifest themselves not in black and white, but in shades of gray. Some biologists argue, in fact, that wolves, dogs, and coyotes represent a single, highly variable and adaptable species.

The idea isn’t as crazy as you might think. Canid taxonomists such as Robert K. Wayne of the Zoological Society of London argue, for example, that gray wolves and domestic dogs, which differ by only two tenths of 1 percent of their mitochondrial DNA, represent one species. Accepting this finding, mammalogists now classify domestic dogs as wolves. The scientific name of a basset hound and a gray wolf are the same: Canis lupus. Coyotes differ from gray wolves and dogs by about 4 percent of their mitochondrial DNA. Given that wolves, dogs, and coyotes can freely interbreed, and their matings produce fertile offspring, the divisions between them may not be as significant as long believed.

Still, behavioral and morphological differences incline most biologists to view gray wolves, Algonquin wolves, and coyotes as separate species. Adirondack wild canids seem most closely allied to coyotes, so that’s the pigeonhole in which we put them. In terms of the sounds they make, the label fits. I’ve sat around campfires in Texas and heard coyotes yipping and wailing, and I’ve caught the same act in the Adirondacks. To my ears, the voices sound much the same.

Eager to hear a seasoned perspective on Adirondack coyotes, I spoke with retired Adirondack guide, pilot, and conservationist Clarence Petty, born in 1905. Petty, 101 at the time of our conversation, had spent much of his life in the North Woods, and his memory remained sharp.

“Coyotes crossed the ice in 1922 near Malone,” he said. “From that time on, they became common, although I never saw a coyote track in the central Adirondacks until several years later.” Petty’s ideas dovetail pretty well with those of biologists, who tend to think that coyotes moved into the Northeast via lowland corridors such as the St. Lawrence Valley. They likely began arriving in earnest in the early twentieth century after eastern wolves had been hunted, trapped, and poisoned into nonexistence.

Petty trapped the back country near his home in Coreys from 1911 to 1925, which was before coyotes became abundant. After he gave up trapping, Petty continued to be active in the woods. There he watched coyotes appear and multiply. “Nobody complained about the doggone things until they got pretty numerous. They didn’t seem to gang up on deer at first, but later they did.” I asked Petty if he thinks coyotes pose a threat to the Adirondack deer herd. “I doubt very much,” he said, “that the number of deer they kill is great.”

Petty’s last comment raises an important question. How many deer do coyotes kill? And what about other animals? “Coyote” and “sheep” go together in the minds of western ranchers, so I decided to start my hunt for an answer by speaking with a North Country sheep farmer.

Roger Hastings and his wife, Linda, live on 200 acres just outside the Adirondack Blue Line near St. Regis Falls. They run 140 sheep on the property. Roger Hastings told me he’s the fifth generation in his family to work the same piece of land.

“Anybody that has livestock has trouble with coyotes,” said Hastings. “You have to keep on top of it. We have guard dogs and high-tensile electric fence with about 7,000 volts running through it.” I asked about the dogs. “They’re Great Pyrenees,” he said, “great, big, white long-haired dogs, a male and a female, and they stay with the sheep all the time.” Hastings said he doesn’t try to shoot coyotes, although he feels their population is too high. “It’s very hard to kill them,” he said. “They’re too smart. They watch you and learn your whole routine. Prevention is the thing.” Does he hate coyotes? “No,” he said. “They’re beautiful animals, highly intelligent, and that’s all you can say about them.”

To gain insight into the relationship between Adirondack white-tailed deer and coyotes, I spoke with Bruce Landon, manager of 21,000-acre Bay Pond Park, a private inholding near Paul Smith’s. Before fears of chronic wasting disease led to a controversial ban on deer feeding, Landon and his staff supplied supplemental feed to about 400 whitetails. In the last years of the program, Landon said, coyote numbers were high, but as far as he could see they had little or no effect in reducing deer numbers. When the feeding stopped, deer numbers fell. So did the numbers of coyotes. “The prey,” he said, “seems to control the predators rather than the other way around.” Landon, who clearly loves white-tailed deer, said, “I personally enjoy hearing coyotes, and I have an appreciation for what they’re doing.” He agreed with my comment that predators in great measure created the whitetail. The deer’s long nimble legs, big ears, wide eyes, and acute senses all evolved in response to the animals that hunted them.

Still, the idea that Adirondack coyotes are slaughtering too many Adirondack deer is heard often. A longtime trapper I spoke with, but who asked not to be quoted by name, expressed certainty that high coyote numbers keep deer populations low. When coyotes were bountied and hunted and trapped year-round, he said, their populations stayed low. In his view, the lifting of the bounty and the shortening of the coyote season precipitated a decline in deer numbers, one that hurts businesses catering to hunters.

Bob Chambers, who has studied Adirondack coyotes perhaps more extensively than anyone, listened respectively to what I’d heard from others, then kept my phone line humming.

He explained how early studies of Adirondack coyote ecology, such as those conducted by Bill Hamilton of Cornell University in the 1950s, found snowshoe hares to be the main prey item. Later work, however, including studies he and others conducted in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, found that deer had become the heavily favored staple in the coyote diet. About half the venison they consumed came from fawns. Chambers said that during these same years, whitetail numbers rose steadily and hunters continued to bring in a substantial deer harvest.

Yet nothing involving coyotes is clear-cut. “Some counties,” Chambers told me, “did not have a dramatic rise in deer numbers as coyotes grew numerous.” In Hamilton County, for example, where the forest cover is dense and snow piles up high and lasts long, Chambers said “estimates of deer numbers remained fairly flat. Where deer reproductive rates are low, coyotes may help limit them. But in places such as St. Lawrence County where deer range is generally good and coyote numbers are high, coyotes don’t seem to hold down the population.”

Chambers doesn’t believe that putting a bounty back on coyotes would be a good idea, or even that it would reduce their numbers. “It’s been pretty well demonstrated in the western states,” he said, “that the harder you hit coyotes the faster they reproduce. Studies show you must remove 70 percent of the coyote population annually to reduce their numbers, and as soon as you stop, they rise sharply again.” He noted that during the years coyotes were bountied in New York, their numbers in most places expanded dramatically. Deer numbers climbed steeply, too.

Scientists such as Chambers and ESF assistant professor Jacqui Frair, who in cooperation with the DEC is laying the groundwork for a five-year statewide study of coyote ecology, take a cautious, data-based approach to coyotes. The rest of us, on the other hand, tend to let our fears and desires color our views.

At our house, we rejoice in the presence of coyotes, and not just because we like hearing their banter in the dead of night. In the years we’ve lived here, we’ve seen the apparent number of deer go up and the health of native plants decline. Despite fencing, deer also devour apple, plum, cherry, and sugar maple trees as fast as we can plant them. One spring, every pink ladyslipper orchid on our road, and there are usually dozens of them, was gnawed to a frayed stem by whitetails. Coyotes? They’re welcome at our place.

10. RED FOX, GRAY FOX

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Although they’re only distantly related, they might as well be cousins. One’s a redhead, the other tends toward gray. One skulks and trots along the ground, while the other does both those things and climbs trees besides. They’re both members of the dog family, or Canidae. Vulpes vulpes, the more familiar of the two in my corner of the Adirondacks, is known as the red fox, and Urocyon cinereoargenteus, often but not always the shyer of the pair, is commonly called the gray.

My wife, two children, and I live on eighteen acres sandwiched between the Saranac Lakes Wild Forest on one side and the McKenzie Mountain Wilderness Area on the other. Big woods surround us. In them both species of Adirondack fox likely occur in considerable number. Yet in many years, we see only reds, and we see them often. Every night drive in the car seems to produce at least one sighting. Perhaps the mix of forest, weedy road edge, sunny backyard, and potato field in our part of Essex County yields prime red fox habitat. And perhaps the boom-and-bust cycles that affect wildlife populations in general are presently raising red fox numbers in our part of the park to the peak of their curve.

Once, though, my wife, Debbie, drove home late one autumn night, and when she pulled up to the house, a gray fox stood blinking in her headlights. Debbie knew to look closely at the tail, which had a black stripe running along the top and ended in a black tip. Red fox tails culminate in white. The animal was doing something either species might do: chowing on sunflower seeds that had piled up on the ground beneath a bird feeder.

Several phone calls to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) biologists turned up no hard numbers for relative abundance of the two foxes in the park (they can’t keep track of everything), so I decided to consult five of the finest Adirondack naturalists I know. Ted Mack, always a trove of local nature lore, came first, but he was off in California with another person on my short list, Sean O’Brien. That left Mike Storey, who retired not long ago as chief naturalist for the Adirondack Park Agency, Bob Hagar, then Saranac Lake’s premier birder, and Gerry Lemmo, the park’s most accomplished freelance wildlife photographer. Lemmo lives just outside the park Blue Line in Queensbury.

Storey began, as he usually does, by professing not to know much, then demonstrated just the opposite. He lives at the edge of Saranac Lake, he told me, and sees red foxes “all the time.” “For at least ten years,” Storey said, “they’ve denned on and off near a neighbor’s house. We’ve seen the adults and the kits, and we find droppings in the driveway all the time.” He said that biologists had predicted rising coyote numbers would lead to a decline in red foxes, but he hasn’t seen any sign of it. “They’re doing just fine, as far as I can tell,” he said.

What about grays? “I’m sure they’re around,” said Storey, “but here, not many people seem to see them. They’re either more elusive than reds, or far lower in numbers, or maybe both.” I asked if he could recall seeing one in the Adirondacks. “Once,” he said after pausing to think. “It was about ten years ago, near the Paul Smiths VIC [Visitor Interpretive Center]. It shot across the road. The sighting was fleeting, almost not long enough to be sure of.” That single sighting of an Adirondack gray fox was Storey’s only one in nearly thirty years.

Bob Hagar, a naturalist of long experience who lives in Saranac Lake, says he’s never seen a gray fox in the park, at least not one he could be sure of. Red are all over the place, he said.

I expected Lemmo to echo Storey’s and Hagar’s findings, but he surprised me. Lemmo sees more grays than reds.

“I’ve photographed both,” he says. “But it seems to me that grays appear more on roads at night than the reds do, or at least on the roads I travel, late at night when I tend to be driving.” In Lemmo’s case, roads take him to photo shoots and lectures all over the Adirondacks, radiating out from his home near Glens Falls. He has photographed gray foxes on West Mountain, just inside the park boundary, and seen them in an array of places: on Route 28 in North River, on Route 86 in Paul Smiths, on the Northway near Chestertown (a dead one), in Friends Lake, Indian Lake, and the Pack Forest, in the Moose River Recreation Area, and a half dozen or more in Queensbury, some inside the Blue Line, some out.

Lemmo says he sees red foxes less widely, generally in areas where woods and open space meet. One such spot is Crown Point, where for years he has photographed red foxes denning and raising young.

Peter O’Shea, a well-known wildlife enthusiast of the western Adirondacks and author of The Great South Woods: Rambles of an Adirondack Naturalist (2000), reports glimpsing an Adirondack gray fox only once. The sighting came at dusk. A single animal bolted across Route 3 in Pitcairn.

As for myself, I’ve seen gray foxes up close in Florida and Texas but never one even at a distance in the Adirondacks. Like Storey, I wondered if the animal might be rare here, or just secretive.

How to tell the two animals apart if you see one yourself? Here are some useful comparisons.

The red fox tends to have a rusty-red head, torso, and tail, with white fur covering the lower cheeks, neck, throat, and belly. The legs, feet, and nose are generally black. The bushy red-brown tail ends in a white tip.

The gray fox, closer to a housecat in size than to a coyote, is gray flecked with black on the upper parts of its head, neck, and torso. The cheeks, throat, and belly are white. The chest, flanks, ear-backs, leg-backsides, feet and neck are rusty or yellow-brown. The hair overall is shorter than a red’s, and the tail is typically less bushy. A black stripe runs along the top, and the tip is colored black.

The colors of both foxes offer good camouflage in a wide range of habitats, which might explain why red and gray squirrels and red and gray wolves wear them, too.

A red fox has yellow eyes, a gray fox dark brown.

An adult red fox generally weighs between eight and seventeen pounds, averaging around ten. Gray foxes tend to be slightly smaller, ranging from seven to fourteen pounds. Coyotes average thirty or so and can weigh a good deal more.

The claws of the red fox tend to be blunt. Those of the gray are sharp like a squirrel’s. The difference probably relates to the fact that red foxes are terrestrial while gray foxes also climb trees.

The feet of the red fox are larger than the gray’s and seem better adapted for life on snow. In the cold months, they’re covered with thick fur that sometimes causes their pads and claws to imprint in snow little if at all. The heel pads are marked with a curved horizontal bar.

Gray foxes, by contrast, have small feet and lack a raised bar on the heel. Pads and claws tend to show clearly in gray fox tracks.

Breeding habitats are similar. Reds mate from December through March, grays late January into May. Red fox litters average six blind three-ounce pups or kits, grays four blind pups of similar weight. Both raise young in dens which often occur in burrows, hollow logs, or natural crevices.

Red foxes stink and gray foxes don’t. Experienced naturalists, trappers, woodswomen, and woodsmen know that if a red fox has recently passed by, the air will be tainted by a skunk-like odor. Red fox dens and droppings reek of the same smell.

Gray foxes lack a distinctive odor, or at least one humans detect at a distance. The only gray fox den I’ve poked my nose into stank only of decaying flesh. Rabbit and rodent skulls littered the berm of earth heaped outside the entrance.

Red foxes sink their sharp teeth (all forty-two of them) into just about anything they can get their muzzles on: mice, voles, birds, eggs, worms, insects, snakes, turtles, frogs, wild fruits, and more.

Gray foxes consume much the same fare, but perhaps by virtue of their climbing ability, eat a greater proportion of fruit and birds.

All members of the dog family bark, yip, or howl. I’ve long wanted to get a handle on the differences between the voices of red and gray foxes. Every spring, we hear weird, abrupt barks in the night around the time we forsake our warm bedroom for the cool comforts of a screened porch. I feel certain the barks are not the work of coyotes, domestic dogs, or wolves. But which fox makes them? Not knowing drives me crazy. The animal barks night after night, yet all my attempts to catch it in the act have turned up nothing.

For help, I contacted two friends: Lang Elliott, a distinguished wildlife sound recordist and author, and Greg Budney, then curator of the Natural Sounds Library (the world’s largest) at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Surely one of these experts could name our barking fox.

Elliott declined to hazard a guess based on a verbal description. He pointed out the lack of identifiable fox barks on his widely distributed recording, Sounds of the North Woods. I felt certain Budney would be able to send me recordings of both species, but I was wrong. Cornell had no definitive recordings of the animals, he said. Why didn’t I record our fox, then hide in the bushes one night and make the identification myself?

Budney’s were good suggestions, and maybe one day I’ll act on them. In the meantime, while Gerry Lemmo continues to see and admire gray foxes, Mike, Bob, and I will probably keep glimpsing reds, and the mystery fox will bark on.

11. WHO IS THAT MASKED MARAUDER?

With raccoons, you either see too much of them, or, when you have friends visiting from overseas and you want to show them one, there’s neither hide nor hair to be found.

For years at our place along the Saranac River, we saw no raccoons whatsoever. Occasionally late at night elsewhere in the Adirondacks, one bolted across the road in front of our car, but this never happened in the driveway. Over time, though, backyard sightings began to happen. Then they began to happen often.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Last night a raccoon visited our bird feeder. I stepped out the door and heard a loud thump as it dropped to the ground. I’ve come to know that thump well.

In a shed that is permeable to raccoons, we store bird seed in a metal garbage can, the lid weighed down with an old car rim. First I tried fastening the lid with a bungee, but a raccoon promptly gnawed the bungee in two. Next I tried rope. The result was the same.

The best looks at Adirondack raccoons tend to occur while camping, often between midnight and 4 a.m. Snug in your sleeping bag, you hear a bang or a crash. An animal—you’re not yet sure what kind—has knocked over your cookstove. Or the noise may be that of clean dishes being flipped on the ground or your cooler being rifled.

Hesitating to confront the visitor, which might be a bear, you switch on a flashlight. A pair of shiny, close-set eyes embedded in a black mask stare back at you. You feel relief. This isn’t a bear. Yet the relief is short-lived. The raccoon knows the game. It will not leave until you crawl out of your sleeping bag. What’s worse, the animal, or animals—raccoons often appear in family groups—returns as soon as you fall back to sleep.

When I’m in a mood to admire raccoons, which I am when it’s not the middle of the night, I view them as bright, cute, and endearing. They used to be popular pets. Calvin Coolidge kept one at the White House. The animal had been a gift from a constituent who expected Coolidge to serve the raccoon at Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, the commander-in-chief, famed in the Adirondacks for making his 1926 Summer White House at White Pine Camp, near Paul Smith’s, kept the raccoon as a pet. He named her Rebecca. Rebecca and the president would take walks together on the White House lawn.

Charming as raccoons can be, I once learned firsthand that they have a brutal and merciless side, at least by human standards. A nature center where I worked had welcomed the donation of a tame, talking crow. A man had found the crow as a nestling and raised it. He loved it as if it was his child. But teaching the crow to talk backfired. The man’s wife could not abide the incessant babble. I housed the bird in the only place I had available: an outdoor cage screened with chicken wire.

The crow grew jumpy over the next few days. It looked ragged, like it wasn’t sleeping. I wish I’d realized why. After about a week, it must have fallen asleep one night against the front of the cage. A raccoon or raccoons (telltale shocks of raccoon fur were left on the chicken wire) grabbed the bird and pulled it out, one chunk of flesh at a time. Nothing was left but feathers. More than thirty years later, I still feel pangs of guilt and grieve for that crow. The tragedy taught me that humans are hardly the only species to practice cruelty to animals.

On the whole, though, I’m delighted to live among raccoons, at least most of the time. This is true especially when I glimpse the animal in the wild, far from campsites and bird feeders. Sometimes I spy one poking its handsome snout out of a den in a hollow tree or hunched over a brook, plucking crayfish from a stream. Raccoons scrub crayfish and other aquatic prey, at least sometimes. This behavior gives rise to the popular notion that raccoons wash their food. Sometimes they do. Just as often they just fish out a tasty morsel and swallow it pronto.

Houseguests from other parts of the world remind me how well-known and warmly regarded our raccoon is in the rest of the world. Just as Africa is famous for its elephants, lions, giraffes, and rhinos, North America is renowned for its raccoons, and for its skunks, too. Expatriate raccoons also add to the fame. In Germany, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Japan, wild populations of introduced raccoons flourish and wreak mayhem. According to a 2012 story in the magazine Der Spiegel, the number of the masked marauders living in the wilds of Germany approaches a million.

Back home, the Adirondack raccoon’s diet includes only a little bratwurst and sushi. Mostly the animals here grow fat (a really big one weighs thirty pounds) on fruits, nuts, fungi, and a wide array of animals. Once considered small bears but now seen as only distant cousins, raccoons are also accomplished dumpster divers. They are notoriously clever at breaking and entering and never averse to grabbing a pizza. Watch for them. You can be sure they’re watching you.

12. MY FAVORITE MARTEN

When I was a boy growing up in Westchester County, my favorite artifact of the family past was not the painting of Niagara Falls hanging in our living room, the work of my Adirondack great-great-grandmother Elnora Graves Brownell, but a fur stole that once belonged to my mother’s mother. Granny’s fur piece intrigued me. It consisted of two boned, gutted, but otherwise complete animal carcasses, the pointed snout of the second clamped down on the shaggy rump of the first—gruesome by today’s standards, yet high fashion in earlier times.

The original owners of the furs were American martens, trapped in the Adirondacks. I can still remember their sewn-up eyes, long silky hair (a mélange of brown and red and straw), fluffy tails, short legs, tiny clawed feet, and soft bellies. Last night, I telephoned my mother and recruited her to take a measurement. The distance from the tip of the first animal’s nose to the terminus of the second’s tail is forty-eight inches, long enough to drape up and over the shoulders of a woman who doesn’t mind adorning herself with taxidermy.

Forty years after first setting eyes on those dead martens, I was still searching for a live one. I’d hiked through prime marten habitat in the High Peaks, in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness, and in our own backyard. In our attic, I’d found hair-filled scats that were likely deposited by martens that had come indoors to hunt mice. I’d roamed the woods by day and by night, scanning trees haunted by red squirrels, hoping for a glimpse of their most nimble predator. But of the American marten, a weasel larger than a mink and smaller than a fisher and able to leap from adjacent tree to tree in a single bound, I’d caught not a glimpse.

I was in good company. American martens, formerly called pine martens (after a species native to England and continental Europe), are seen by few. This doesn’t mean they’re rare. Logged and trapped nearly to extirpation here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they’ve steadily risen in number as patchwork and cut-over forests acquired by the state have matured under the protection of the Forever Wild clause. “Martens love best overgrowth forests of gloomy fir: even broken woods will not do,” Ernest Thompson Seton wrote nearly a century ago. Since trapping of Adirondack martens resumed in 1978, the annual kill has ranged from a low of eleven in 1994 to a high of 225 in 2001.

The best chances for seeing a marten come during the cold months. The mottled brown of the animal vanishes into its surroundings in spring, summer, and early fall, but snow renders the invisible visible. Martens grow thicker fur to keep warm in winter, but their essential color, which is brown in varying shades, remains the same year-round. The more time you spend outdoors in winter, the greater chance you have of spotting a marten.

If you find a marten, it’ll likely be leaping from limb to limb like a squirrel, popping up out of powder in which it’s been rooting for mice, voles, and shrews, or tearing into a food bag you’ve hung from a tree. First you may take the apparition for a small fox, although this “fox” is a high-wire artist. The only marten that woodswoman Nellie Staves of Tupper Lake told me she ever saw popped jack-in-the-box-style out of a stack of cement blocks. The marten’s friskiness is purposeful. The animal spends its days and nights chasing all manner of small mammals and birds, although some haunt backcountry shelters in the Adirondack High Peaks, living off scraps, and naturalist Peter O’Shea reported one that hung around a camp feeding on “jelly, meat scraps, and suet.”

When a marten sleeps, it does so in a den. The hideaway is generally situated in the hollow of an old, standing tree, although martens sometimes establish quarters on or under the ground. Having a place to escape harsh weather and snooze beyond the reach of predators such as fishers is vital. The marten’s dependence on hollows may be the chief reason it tends to thrive in old growth but be absent from managed forest.

Marten tracks are seen far more often than martens themselves, and winter visitors to conifer woods in the Adirondacks might want to keep an eye out for them. Martens, like other weasels, tend to bound, and as a result, their tracks often occur in clusters of four that look like pairs because the back feet land on top of the prints made by the forefeet. Martens may also plod through the snow as fishers often do, in which case their prints are staggered. A typical marten track measures about two inches long and two inches wide, although size varies.

To find out whether a given set of prints was made by a marten or a small fisher, follow them. Martens, which are light, tend to leave shallow impressions compared to those left by chunkier fishers. Also, the feet of the fisher tend to leave more distinct toe marks than the woolly feet of the marten.

Update: since writing the above paragraphs, I’ve had the pleasure of multiple marten sightings, some near home, and some farther afield. One day in September, a marten appeared on the trunk of a cherry tree close to our back door. It was probably not coincidental that our free-ranging pet ducks were gathered nearby at a wading pool. I happened along just in the nick of time.

13. THE DARK PHANTOM OF THE NORTH WOODS

“One morning, this winter,” said pioneering Adirondack surveyor Ver-planck Colvin, in an 1876 speech to the Albany Institute, “as we ascended the steep slopes of Mount Skylight through the deep, freshly fallen snow, a dog belonging to one of the guides broke away fiercely upon a fresh trail. . . . An inspection of the trail showed the foot-prints of a black-cat.” Colvin went on to describe a “carnivorous animal, agile and powerful” that hunts “rabbits, with (judging from the trail) an occasional diversion after mice, or other small game.”

Colvin’s “black-cat” has also been known as Pennant’s marten, black fox, fisher, and fisher-cat. Old-time Canadian trappers knew it as pekan, wejack, and pequam. Of all the names, the one most widely accepted today, fisher, provoked Colvin’s scorn. He deemed the label wrong-headed “because he is not a fisher, as it seldom eats other fish than those which it is able to steal from an angler.” Colvin’s point is well taken. Fishers don’t fish, at least not generally.

What do fishers do? They catch and eat other animals, usually but not always ones smaller than themselves. It seems the fisher is equally at home in the trees, where it hunts porcupines, squirrels, and birds, and on the ground, where it catches, as the old saying goes, “as catch can.” Seeing them doing any of this is another matter. The fur is such a dark brown as to be nearly black, which allows the fisher to submerge and disappear in shadowy woods the same way black bears do. Few of us get a decent, sustained look at one.

While I’ve seen dozens of fishers, every encounter but one has taken place at night while I was driving down a dark road. All I glimpsed in each case was what appeared to be a black hairy animal, long of torso, thickly furred of tail, humping across the asphalt in the awkward, roly-poly way weasels move in the open. I’m still waiting for my first satisfying audience.

The fishers I’ve glimpsed were not ferret-sized and sausage-shaped like minks, which can also appear black, but thick and sturdy and more on the scale of otters. Adult male fishers usually measure between thirty-six and forty-seven inches and weigh up to eleven pounds. Females, identical except for their smaller size, measure thirty to thirty-seven inches and weigh half as much.

The only fisher I’ve encountered in the clear light of day turned up along a highway. I was hurrying down to the Mohonk Mountain House, near New Paltz, New York, to give an after-dinner lecture. My wife, Debbie, and I were driving along Route 73 between St. Huberts and the Adirondack Northway when a dark-chocolate-colored lump appeared in the opposing lane. Our schedule didn’t afford us time to stop, but never ones to pass up interesting roadkill, we pulled over anyhow.

Aside from being dead, the fisher was in pristine condition. It appeared to be asleep. Picking it up, I found the body still warm, suggesting the animal had been struck only minutes earlier. The fur was thick, neither soft nor stiff, and a wash of gold imparted beauty to the face. My first thought was to check the fisher for porcupine quills. I found half a dozen in each of two places: around the fisher’s short blunt muzzle, and on its rump. Fishers attack porkies not by flipping them on their backs, as was long thought, but by attacking head-on, biting the well-defended rodents again and again on the face. This blinds the victim, allowing the predator to move in and attack the belly, where there are no quills. According to biologist Andrew Saunders, a porcupine provides a veritable feast for a fisher and can feed it for as many as thirty-five days.

The most interesting thing about this particular fisher was its smell. It was glorious. No kidding. The wild, spicy musk of the animal, which comes in part from plantar glands between the pads of its hind feet, so enthralled me that I didn’t wash my hands before dinner that night. Nor did I wash them before my lecture. Only at the very end of the day, when faced with a toothbrush, did I finally scrub. For hours, including when the lights were off and the audience at my slide lecture couldn’t see me, I’d been slipping a hand to my greedy nostrils every chance I got. The scent was that good.

Fishers occur in great number in the Adirondacks today, their status rewritten since the 1930s when trapping and habitat loss made them hard to find and pushed fur prices as high as $750 for a single pelt. The natural range of the fisher includes woods from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, with fingers of territory reaching southward in mountains. Today, surging Adirondack populations, which never vanished, are dispersing and helping to restock (with and without human intervention) old haunts such as the Catskills and the Hudson Valley.

While scientists place the fisher and its weasel, marten, and otter cousins in the order Carnivora, it actually is, like most so-called carnivores, an opportunistic omnivore. Given the chance, fishers feed on fruits, nuts, and fungi as well as flesh. If live prey isn’t on offer, fishers will scrounge up roadkill, scraps left by coyotes, and deer offal jettisoned by hunters.

The list of animals captured and consumed by fishers is long. In addition to porcupines it includes snowshoe hares, red squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks, mice, voles, and shrews. One of these days I’m going to get a better look at a fisher. When I do, I hope I have a camera in hand and hope it’s carrying lunch.

14. THE WILD, WILY ADIRONDACK OTTER

My favorite sighting of an Adirondack river otter (Lontra canadensis) took place from our bedroom window. It was morning. My wife, Debbie, and our then-baby, Tasman, were up for an early feed. So was the otter. Debbie had been looking out toward the Saranac River where it flows across our land. On the far bank, she spied a long dark shape humping downstream with a seal-like gait. Otters move as awkwardly on land as they rocket gracefully through water, although one could still outsprint a track star. Debbie woke the rest of the household. Four of us watched the otter lumber along, seeking the right spot to jump. Then with a sudden leap into the liquid it was gone. The otter must have taken a long swim because we never saw it surface.

Otters weigh up to thirty pounds or so. They have been known to travel a quarter mile underwater without bobbing up to breathe. They can descend to depths of forty feet, remain under for up to eight minutes or thereabouts, and in pursuit of fish and crayfish zoom forward at six knots. The energy of river otters seems boundless. Unlike their distant and more sedentary cousins, the sea otters of the North Pacific rim, river otters don’t loll about on their backs, wielding rocks to smash abalone and crab shells. Incessant, exuberant movement is the river otter’s specialty.

Evolution equips otters for lives in liquid. Like those of seals and sea lions, limbs and external ears are much reduced, diminishing drag. The feet are webbed, and the fur is dense and oily, making it both an efficient insulator and impervious to soaking. Ear openings and nostrils clamp shut underwater.

The otter, largest among Adirondack members of the weasel family, has a way of turning up when you least expect it, then, hardly granting you time for rational observations, vanishing. Sometimes an otter reappears, erupting from a lake with a fish in its mouth, and sometimes it doesn’t. Lately I see otters several times in a year, but earlier in my life I measured the intervals between sightings in years. Even Dave Cilley, a longtime Adirondack canoe guide and owner of St. Regis Canoe Outfitters, reports that he sees otters only occasionally. He finds tracks and droppings often, though, especially in winter during outings from his base west of Saranac Inn on Floodwood Road.

Even in places such as the Adirondacks where otters are numerous, their numbers often fail to yield frequent sightings. The animals are wary. They avoid human contact. They cover miles of sometimes linear territories, and often otters don’t return to a spot for a week or more. Like a great many mammals, they also tend to be night-active.

When sightings do come, we remember them. My friend Joe Hackett, an accomplished Adirondack woodsman and fishing guide, tells of watching an adult otter haul its young out of rapids on the Saranac River. “It was very entertaining,” he told me. “The otters, a mother and her kits, were swimming in flat water just above the rapids. One by one the five or six kits got sucked into the current and straight down the rapids. The mother got very upset. She squeaked loudly, raced after them, and one by one plucked the kits out. She’d tuck one under a tree and stash another in a bush, and so on, until she was ready to ferry them all back to one place on the bank. The kits were adorable. Then they dove back in the rapids and drove their mother crazy all over again.”

Hackett speaks of otters with affection but has seen their vexatious side. Otters sometimes kill fish and eat only the heads, he says, and occasionally they steal stringers of fish.

If otters have one trait that endears them to us, it’s their love of sliding. Like my son Ned when he was in his preschool years, otters are compulsive about it. Given a slope and mud or snow, summer, fall, winter, and spring they’ll take to their bellies and scoot. Young otters do this, and so do adults. Why? We can only speculate. Play surely helps otters keep nimble and strong, and it may aid in maintaining cordial relations between family members and neighbors.

Guides such as Cilley and Hackett see a lot of otter sliding places, but even they concede the animals are tricky to spot. The Adirondackers who see otters most often are trappers, and even they don’t find them easily. Paul Jensen, a furbearer biologist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) explained to me that otters are spread widely over the landscape, and few trappers target them. Renowned Tupper Lake trapper Nellie Staves put it another way. “When I get an otter,” she told me, “it’s always an accident.”

According to Jensen, most otters collected in the Adirondacks are brought in by beaver trappers. Trappers like Staves are glad to catch them because the pelts are valuable. Today, said Jensen, an otter skin may go for more than $150, especially if it’s large and light brown. (Most Adirondack otters are dark.) Statewide, the annual otter take averaged 1,054 between 1987 and 2006, with nearly half the harvest coming from the Adirondacks.

One Adirondack trapper who made something of a specialty of pursuing otters was Ted Bradley. A Tupper Lake native, Bradley when I spoke with him worked as a corrections officer at Camp Gabriels, near Paul Smiths. He was forty-five and had been trapping since he was seven.

“I just love being out on a snowy lake, deep in the woods. It’s peaceful,” he told me. “Trapping is good exercise, and I see things other people don’t see.”

Otters included. When we spoke, Bradley was trapping around fifteen to twenty otters a year, with nineteen caught during the 2005– 2006 season. Bradley took most of his otters on private lands owned by hunting clubs.

Like an otter himself, Bradley roamed a huge territory, ranging from Long Lake to the St. Regis, and west to Cranberry Lake. “I lose about eighteen pounds a season, and on foot I cover seven or eight miles in a day.” Bradley also used a snowmobile. He owned leg hold traps but seldom used them anymore. For otters he preferred Conibear #330s, which, he said, generally make quick kills. Each trap is mounted inside a pair of five-gallon plastic buckets taped end-to-end with the bottoms removed. This rig protects the trap from freezing. Bradley rarely used bait. Instead his technique was to find trails that otters used to travel from pond to pond. There he’d set traps in tight spots between steep banks.

Trappers are sometimes cast by those opposed to trapping as dim-witted and unfeeling, but I found Bradley to be a thoughtful, bright, articulate man with abundant respect for the animals he pursued. Otters, he said, are “a nice animal—fun to watch eat and play. I leave the young otters alone, which you tend to catch in the water, and go for the old ones.”

In the Adirondacks, where by all accounts otters are plentiful, nature makes more of the creatures than habitats can support. The excess starve or are killed by predators such as coyotes, foxes, and eagles. Bradley told me he feels he’s harvesting a bit of the surplus. Scavengers, including bald eagles, consume the carcasses he leaves behind. There’s truth in what he says. The first wild otter I ever saw, deep in the woods, was several days dead. It was emaciated. One of its canine teeth had sheared off or been worn to a stub. After a hard winter, the otter had likely died a slow death of starvation.

Biologists such as Jensen and David Mayack, who spoke with me from his office at DEC’s Hale Creek Field Station in Gloversville, have concern for the river otter’s future, but it’s not trappers they’re worried about. The American lifestyle and the air pollution it generates is the issue. The mercury from coal-burning power plants and municipal incinerators that threatens the health of fish-eating loons also finds its way into piscivorous mammals. Methylmercury (a toxic compound of the element) found by Mayack and colleagues in otter’s livers and fur remain at sublethal levels to date, Mayack told me. It’s likely that the toxins weaken otters and in various ways diminish their ability to feed, frolic, and raise young.

Adirondack otter populations appear to be holding strong, at least for the moment.

15. THE ADIRONDACK “DEVIL-BEAR”

What has thirty-eight sharp teeth, looks like a bear, lumbers on dry land like an otter, smells like a skunk, crunches bones like a dog, and until 1840 or thereabouts prowled Adirondack forests?

The animal that solves the riddle carries many names. Early French Canadian trappers in the region called it “carcajou.” Others knew it as “the glutton,” “stink-bear,” “devil-bear,” “quickhatch,” or “wood-devil.” Pioneering biologists such as the New York State zoologist James DeKay, whose landmark Zoology of New York (published 1842–1844) provided the last widely accepted report of the creature in the Adirondacks, knew the beast as Gulo luscus. Today scientists know it as it as Gulo gulo, acknowledging that the animal and its European and Siberian look-alikes belong to one and the same species.

Still in the dark? Meet the wolverine, the first unappreciated predator to be eliminated from the Adirondack Mountains by European settlers.

A wolverine is built like a bulldog. Its back is broad and powerful, the legs short and sturdy and snout somewhat flattened. Wolverine means “little wolf,” but the wolverine is not a cousin of wolves or dogs. The wolverine isn’t a bear, either, even though it looks a good deal like a small one. Its hair is coarse and dark, save for a lighter-colored band that sweeps down each flank. The wolverine’s shape and woolly coat led naturalists to classify it as a kind of bear until the nineteenth century.

The wolverine is, in fact, the largest member of the weasel family. Like every member of the weasel family, this dog-sized cousin of the fisher, mink, and American marten has musk glands that give off a mal-odorous bouquet.

Early nature writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton portrayed the wolverine as a monster. Wolverines were said to kill for pleasure, to break into and ransack the insides of trappers’ cabins for sheer love of mayhem, and to attack wolves and mountain lions whose kills they had appropriated. Seton slandered the wolverine in various ways, terming it “a greedy animal hated by Indians and white alike.” John James Audubon described the wolverine as “proverbially one of the greatest gourmandizers among the ‘brutes.’”

No doubt wolverines are vexing animals to share a wilderness with. In the business of breaking and entering and raiding food caches, they make black bears look like amateurs. Trappers of old would often bury pelts under heaped-up logs to protect them from wolverines. Still, the powerful and tenacious weasel would often dig its way into a pile and, with the application of teeth, musk, and urine, spoil what they found. The wolverines were simply doing what nature designed them to do, which is to find and process carcasses, as hyenas in Africa do. But trappers working hard to make their livings had different perspectives.

Reputations, even undeserved ones, sometimes hold grains of truth. When pressed, a wolverine may well be ornery by necessity. If you’re aiming to appropriate kills from larger predators such as mountain lions, wolves, and humans with traps, you’d better be prepared to fight for them. And if you’re a scavenger, one that’s too slow to catch much on the ground and not nimble enough to subdue your daily bread in trees, rather than starve you’ll raid the occasional pantry.

Wherever wolverines live in North America, which is to say, far northwestern Ontario westward and in small numbers in the northern Rockies, they are thin on the ground. Rainer Brocke, predator expert and professor emeritus of wildlife biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, explained to me that wolverines “need huge areas of space.” “They’re loners and cover immense distances,” he said, “meaning that the demands of studying them exceed the time and budget restraints of most researchers.”

Wolverine populations survived into the twentieth century in Labrador and northern Quebec, but the last credible reports of the animal from these provinces are now decades old.

Might the wolverine someday return to the Adirondacks, either through a repatriation of its own doing or an effort by biologists to restore it? After all, the Canadian wildlife biologist C. H. D. Clarke, in a paper published in 1972 by Nelson Rockefeller’s Temporary Study Commission on the Future of the Adirondack Park, advocated the stink-bear’s reintroduction.

Ken Kogut, wildlife manager for DEC’s Region 5, told me no. “The trappers came in,” he said, “and the wolverines were the first to go. They’re very much a wilderness species. They’re highly vulnerable to trapping pressure, the males defend immense territories, and there is simply not enough wild land here anymore to support a minimum viable population. It’s just not going to occur.”

Brocke agreed. “The idea that the wolverine could ever make it in the Adirondacks again is ludicrous. There are too many roads now and too many opportunities for mortality, and the wolverines wouldn’t have a high enough birth rate to keep up.”

And so, the Adirondack Mountain wolverine, in all likelihood, will live on only in history books. The animal was already gone when Clinton Hart Merriam published his Mammals of the Adirondack Region in 1884. Wolverines were hold-outs from the last ice age, when glaciers pushed tundra, boreal forest, and the creatures that lived in them far to the south of their limits today.

Still, in the long view, who knows? In due time, glaciers will return, far northern forests and their wildlife will be pushed southward, and riding the wave yet again may come the wolverine.

16. SKUNKED AND NOT COMPLAINING

First there were strange diggings in a road embankment along one of our Bloomingdale property boundaries, diggings that created caves each just big enough to hold a couple of loaves of bread. Then the evidence got more persuasive. Something churned up the lawn behind the house. Whatever it was (I was beginning to think I knew) scratched shallow, thimble-sized holes and was almost certainly digging for grubs. Third came the clincher. One afternoon, along a brushy edge near the disturbed turf, my nostrils flared. I recognized the acrid, signature scent of Mephitis mephitis (literally, “foul-smelling, foul smelling”), better known as the striped skunk.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

I was pleased to confirm the presence of a skunk on our property. My wife, children, and I are conducting a wildlife survey of the place. During years of watching and tracking, we’d recorded black bears, coyotes, both kinds of Adirondack fox, white-tailed deer, muskrats, beavers, mink, ermine, long-tailed weasels, deer mice, woodland voles, and woodchucks, but a skunk had thus far eluded us. Partly this was because distribution is spotty in the Adirondacks. Skunks thrive in villages, where they flourish on everything from garden pests to pet food. But out in the wilds, without porches to den under and lawns to indulge their yen for grubs, they’re absent more often than not.

It also happens that I’m inordinately fond of skunks.

Skunks appeal on several levels. They’re unfairly maligned for their malodorous musk, which the animal uses only as a last resort to defend itself. When I was a young child, the first skunk I ever got a close look at was cornered by our family dog, who seemed bent on killing it. The skunk had retreated under a pile of lumber. Sam couldn’t quite reach it. Although the dog continued to bark and bare teeth, the skunk resisted what must have been a powerful temptation to teach its tormentor a lesson.

Years ago, in a previous life, I held a wildlife rehabilitator’s license. I served over several years as foster parent to a great many orphaned animals—opossums, gray squirrels, raccoons, skunks, a red fox, assorted songbirds, a red-tailed hawk, and a pair of great-horned owls. Of all of them, the handsomest, most affectionate, and most endearing were the skunks. The little stinkers loved to be cuddled, never bit the hand that fed them, never sprayed, and won my heart with their gentle and easygoing dispositions. To know a skunk, I say, is to love a skunk.

Skunk may derive from the Abenaki Indian word segonkku, meaning a creature that squirts. And squirt a skunk certainly can. If threatened with violence, the self-defense expert presents its hindquarters. Up goes the tail, and out hurtles a spray that can be launched with considerable accuracy six feet and more. Aromatic compounds called thiols make the stuff perhaps the most awful smelling liquid on the planet. Caught in the eye, eau de skunk inflicts temporary blindness.

Predators generally stay clear of skunks, although there’s a notable exception: the great horned owl. Hunting by moonlight or at dawn and dusk when skunks often prowl, the owl ignores the mammal’s bold warning colors and catches them if it can. A great horned owl, like most forest birds, seems to have little or no sense of smell. It also has a third eyelid called a nictitating membrane that helps protect its keen vision from sharp objects and foreign substances. Injured great horned owls brought to wildlife rehabilitators often reek of skunk.

Tomato juice, the traditional antidote for de-skunking dogs, actually has little effect on the musk. When relief is needed, chemists recommend dousing with a mild solution of hydrogen peroxide or baking soda, which will take the punch out of the thiols.

What do skunks do when they’re not insulting nostrils? They’re plodding peaceably across the landscape, often but not always under cover of darkness, sniffing out each other and nosing around for good things to eat. Skunks sink their teeth into most of the same things you or I will, supplemented by bugs, mice, fish, and dead animals. Mating is a late-winter affair. Females give birth to five or six winsome little skunklets. These trail behind Mom for months after they’re weaned. Deadbeat Dad, meanwhile, loves, leaves, and plays the field.

What are skunks related to? North America’s six skunk species are close kin to each other, but after that, nothing is black and white. They were long considered weasels, or mustelids, yet DNA evidence shows that skunks stand apart. Today biologists place them in their own family. Its name, Mephitidae, means “stinkers.”

If skunks have a downside, it’s that they can transmit rabies. Entering the late stages of the disease, deranged and slobbering like a rabid raccoon or bat, they pose a potentially lethal danger to all around them. Since there’s no way to tell at a glance whether a skunk’s infected, it’s important to keep your distance from skunks, even the babies. When I did wildlife rehabilitation work in the lower Hudson Valley in the early 1980s, skunk rabies had not yet crossed the New Jersey border, or so it was then believed.

Still, most skunks are healthy. Enjoy them how and when you can, sensibly, which is to say, at a distance, March through October. November through February, it’s rare to spot an Adirondack skunk. They’re not hibernating but rather holed up in underground dens. Males typically retreat alone, while females cluster in social groups of lady friends and young. Theirs is a good life, all things considered. Skunks enjoy themselves, I think, except when provoked.

17. COLD COMFORT FOR HARES

“His feet are like great pads,” the naturalist John Burroughs (1837–1921) wrote of the snowshoe hare, “and his track in the snow has little of the sharp, articulated expression of . . . animals that climb or dig. . . . There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap.”

Aside from exhibiting an unfortunate gender bias in his pronouns, Burroughs gives a good feeling for the signature traces left by snowshoe hares during the cold months. White stuff begins to pile up on the Adirondack landscape after Halloween, and hares keep hopping. November yields to December. Brown gives way to white in the coats of our lanky, rabbitlike lagomorphs. All but invisible at this stage, hares continue to go about their peaceful business, keeping their inner fires burning on a vegetarian diet of twigs, buds, and bark. Each hare will toil to stay alive until spring delivers fresh greens.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Life is hard for an Adirondack hare, especially after the weather turns cold. Truth is, we don’t know much about that life. At Paul Smith’s College, biologists Jorie Favreau, Celia Evans, and a team of students aim to relieve us of some of our ignorance. Working under a grant from the National Science Foundation, one that chiefly subsidizes student fieldwork, the group is conducting a multiyear study of the behavior and ecology of Adirondack snowshoe hares.

While Evans’s group focused on learning what hares choose to eat and where they find it, Favreau and her crew looked at how hares might modify their behavior to survive the cold months. They knew, as most of us do, that snowshoe hares have supersized hindfeet, feet that in autumn sprout stiff hairs, enlarging their surface area. In this way big feet become snowshoes. But what else do hares do? Some Adirondack mammals (think raccoon, skunk, chipmunk, and black bear) put on extra body fat as winter comes on and sleep prodigiously. Extremists such as the woodchuck and two species of jumping mice plunge into deep hibernation. Yet hares remain lean and active. While most winter-active mammals retreat to dens when the wind howls and temperatures plummet, hares stay out or simply hunker in the snow. Through the long, cold Adirondack winter they keep busy, as tracks on the snow attest. How do they get away with it?

I asked Favreau. She explained that mammals such as snowshoe hares have what are known as low critical temperatures, below which hypothermia sets in and the animals shiver. She credits her students with coming up with the hypothesis that hares, when temperatures dip below the low critical mark, actually become more active and thereby generate heat. The sample size was small and further work is needed, said Favreau, but the findings of a study involving radio collars with built-in activity sensors suggest that, as suspected, hares grew more active during periods of extreme cold, rather than less.

Favreau and students conducted most of their fieldwork in what she described as “harey” habitat at Hayes Brook, near Paul Smith’s. Additional studies were done on Paul Smith’s College property and in Saranac Lake at Dewey Mountain. “Hares,” said Favreau, “are really nice to work with, because they’re simple. They’re solitary, so we don’t have to deal with social behavior; there are quite a few around; and they stay active throughout the year.” She spoke with pride in her students and their hard work, and with humility regarding all that remains to be learned about Adirondack snowshoe hares.

The Paul Smith’s researchers aim in the future to look at the amount of space individual hares occupy during the winter, and whether the winter and summer ranges are the same or different. Basic natural history work has been done and will be done in the future, too, such as backtracking in the snow to see where the animals have been, what they’ve been doing, and exactly what sorts of microhabitat in the woods they require. “The white rabbit,” Thoreau wrote of the snowshoe hare in his journal one winter day in 1854, “[has] learned by long practice to find [its] food where a newcomer would inevitably starve.” The team aims to figure out how they do it.

Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, I’ll keep doing something I like to do at our place during the cold months, which is track snowshoe hares through the woods. I rarely see a hare after snow covers the ground. The animals’ white fur, demonstrably more efficient at retaining heat than the summer coat, makes them hard to spot. Yet in years when hares are abundant I spy their tracks almost everywhere.

Hare tracks have taught me that the lagomorphs, like people, don’t always get things right. Once near our driveway I found a series of tracks that ended badly. A snowshoe hare had leapt forward, miscalculated, and landed in deep powder, as my Adirondack grandfather might have put it in language picked up working in a lumber camp, “ass over teakettle.”

18. FREQUENT FLIERS

More than a quarter century ago, after years of searching to no avail, I caught my first clear, sustained look at a flying squirrel flying—actually volplaning, which is the technical term for what flying squirrels do when they glide from high perches to low.

My friend John Junker and I had just driven five hours to the Adirondacks from North White Plains in Westchester County. As the summer sun paled in the west, we drove through Indian Lake, then turned down the Cedar River Road. We planned to leave our car at Wakely Dam, float a canoe, and paddle up the Cedar River Flow. A rising moon would help us find a campsite.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Walking toward the ranger cabin, looking for the right place to leave the car, we saw something astonishing. The day’s last glimmer of light illuminated a Frisbee-like shape sailing out of the woods. It zoomed over the road and vanished among the trees on the far side. Before we had a chance to think, second and third UFOs, identical to the first, traced the same path.

On several occasions in the past, I’d blundered on flying squirrels while cleaning out bluebird nestboxes. These abundant but nocturnal animals often nest in hollow trees, and birdhouses offer a snug facsimile. Once, a flying squirrel had leapt on my chest and scurried to the top of my head. That one gave me goosebumps. Yet these were the first I’d seen clearly at night, doing what flying squirrels are famous for.

The Wakely dam aeronauts were UFOs because two species occur in the Adirondacks, the northern and the southern, and I wasn’t sure which we’d seen. An experienced observer, which I am today but was not then, can separate the two fairly reliably. Northerns approach the size of red squirrels. Southerns nearly match the proportions of chipmunks. Northern flying squirrels have been recorded in thirteen Adirondack townships, from Willsboro to Webb, southerns in only four. The Indian Lake fliers, deep in the mountains, were likely, but not necessarily, northerns.

Flying squirrels are gliders, not fliers. They take off high and land low, like the first hang gliders piloted by the Wright Brothers. Flying squirrels cannot leap off the ground and flap toward the sky like most birds and most bats can. Still, saying a flying squirrel can’t fly strikes me as being a bit picayune. After all, northern flying squirrels have been known to travel nearly 300 feet in a single sweeping glide. Compared to Wilbur Wright in his first powered flight, that’s more than double.

The volplaning habit has evolved in various animals around the world, including marsupial gliders in Australia, a Central American tree frog, and in Asia, flying squirrels (to which ours are closely related), flying dragons (a kind of lizard), and even a species of flying snake. Why vol-plane? Biologists speculate that the behavior helps the animals that do it conserve energy and escape from predators. Flying squirrels make tasty meals for owls and martens.

An Adirondack flying squirrel begins each flight with a leap. Instantly, forelegs and hind legs spread, unfurling a muscular, fur-covered, parachute-like membrane called the patagium. A bone-like spur of cartilage sticks out from each wrist, adjusting the patagium’s shape and allowing the animal to make turns. The flattened tail serves as a rudder. When the squirrel lands, the patagium folds up and all but disappears along the animal’s flanks.

Flying squirrels abound in the Adirondacks and throughout the forests of North America. Few people see them, though, because they’re nocturnal, and because the grays and browns of their fur blend in with the grays and browns of tree trunks. Getting a look at a wild flying squirrel is largely a matter of luck. You have to be at the right place at the right moment looking in the right direction.

As they bustle about the treetops, searching for seeds, buds, lichen, and, in season, baby birds, flying squirrels communicate with each other with a variety of chits, chirps, clucks, churrs, and whistles. The chits are particularly easy to recognize. Once you get the hang of them, you can walk in the woods at night and realize that flying squirrels work and play overhead almost everywhere you go.

At the Adirondack Ecological Center, operated near Newcomb, New York, by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, research biologist Charlotte Demers reports finding northern flying squirrels during small mammal surveys. The squirrels come to the ground to feed on fungi, find their way into box traps, and are released unharmed.

In winter, northern flying squirrels have been observed plunging into snow, there to dig for dinner. Fungal structures called mycorrhizae coat tree roots like a skin, extracting sugars and other substances from the roots and in turn helping trees absorb nutrients from the soil. Mycorrhizae may host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which in turn pull nitrogen out of air pockets in the soil, bind it into nutritive compounds, and share them with the fungus and tree. By feeding on mycorrhizal fungi, then defecating elsewhere, northern flying squirrels seem to play a vital role in maintaining forest health. The feces contain fungal spores. Trees depend on mycorrhizae for nourishment, and mycorrhizae, or some of them, seem to need flying squirrels for spore dispersal.

Often at night, a northern flying squirrel turns up at our bird feeder. It’s so tame we can approach closely. The eyes are big, black, and round, like those of a deer mouse. The fur, gray-brown on the back and white on the belly, looks glossy and soft. Watch your own bird feeder after dark, and you may see one, too.

19. THE PORCUPINES OF SUMMER

They’re big, they’re rotund, they sit on branches out in the open, and they don’t move much. Yet we rarely see them. Why? There’s not a simple answer. Questions about these peculiar animals abound. The North American species, the world’s third-largest rodent after the capybara and the beaver, may well be the most enigmatic Adirondack mammal of them all.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Once, after delivering an evening slide talk at the Old Forge Library, I began the drive home to Bloomingdale, near Saranac Lake. It was a humid summer night. I drove slowly, as I always do after dark, to avoid hitting animals. Although I’m loath to confess it, twice during the drive I spied a porcupine in the road, and twice I could not brake quickly enough, and twice I struck and killed a porcupine. It was awful. I roiled with guilt for weeks.

As far as I can recall, those are the only Adirondack porcupines I’ve seen in summer during the last few years. The paucity of sightings puzzles me. Signs of them in the woods—porcupine dens in hollow trees, filthy with droppings, and places where they’ve gnawed bark off trunks or feasted on sapling hemlocks—abound. The animals are nocturnal; that’s part of it. Yet while never easy to find at any time of year, at least in my haunts, porcupines seem especially elusive when it’s warm.

There’s a reason for it. Porcupines crave salt. Many people revile them because in their search for the stuff, porkers seek out ax handles, the hand grips of prize fishing rods, banisters, and automobile brake lines crusted with road-salt. The salt craving comes not from any particular cussedness or moral failing on the rodent’s part. The porcupine’s diet leans heavily on leaves. Leaves abound in potassium. A diet high in potassium drives sodium from the porcupine’s body. And so it seeks salt.

Where to find sodium if not on a fly rod or the underside of your car? In the absence of human-generated sources, the porcupine seeks the stuff in wetlands. Therein lies the secret of its summer disappearance.

The porcupine, an arboreal and terrestrial beast across most of the calendar, heads to low, wet places when the weather turns warm. There it is hard to spot. There, too, it cools itself in water, and there, by noshing on salt-rich plants such as water lilies (swimming if need be to reach them), it replenishes the sodium in its tissues.

In this respect the porcupine and the moose are alike. It’s hard to imagine two animals more divergent in size and shape, yet they both feed heavily on potassium-rich, sodium-poor diets in the uplands during the cool and cold months. Then, during the warm part of the year, porcupines and moose haunt wetlands and browse the salad-like growth that fringes ponds, meandering rivers, and the shallow parts of lakes.

If animals talked, as they do in stories, it would be easy to imagine a conversation one sultry summer night between a porcupine munching on water lilies and a moose indulging its annual yen for pond-and-river-fringing pickerelweed.

“Hello, Porkie. What are you doing out here? Over your head, aren’t you?”

“Moose, what are you doing out here, wading?”

“I asked you first.”

“A heavy rain fell last night,” says the porcupine. “Washed most of the salt off the cars, the tool handles, and the fishing poles. Nothing for an honest rodent with salt lust to do but come down from the hills. It’s cooler down here in the shallows, and the eating is divine.”

“Agreed,” says the moose. “I see your point. In fact, I see about 30,000 of them. Truth is, I had the same craving. Potato chips would have been nice, but I couldn’t fit through the door at the Fish Creek Trading Post.”

So the conversations might continue as July yields to August. Twentysomething-pound porcupines move in and out of wetlands, foraging, wallowing, and surely bumping into the occasional quarter-to-half-ton moose.

Paddlers in canoes and kayaks occasionally see the animals at work, but far more often they see evidence of their feeding. Last summer at Fish Creek, for example, our family of four human halophiles paddled up a channel one evening in our canoe, debating who should get the last few tortilla chips. Rounding a bend, we looked ahead and saw evidence of wholesale herbivory among the pickerelweeds. Bushels of the stuff had been gobbled up. Most of the eating had been done by moose, I suspect, but vegan porcupines may have done some of the pruning, too.

Every porcupine I’ve ever seen has been in a tree, or on a highway, aside from one that lived in the crawl space under our guest room one winter. That porker made no trouble, showing itself a perfect lady or gentleman until the day it moved to accommodations elsewhere. I also enjoyed an intimate relationship with a porcupine once. It was a captive animal at a nature center where I worked. This particular animal, painfully shy, made a poor exhibit animal because it avoided human contact, except with me. Late at night, before going to bed, I’d visit the porcupine’s outdoor cage. At the sound of my voice, the porker would burst out of its den or stop whatever it was doing, climb the cage’s wire screening, and offer me its soft, quill-free belly. I would scratch it while the porkie grunted with delight.

20. HOW THE ADIRONDACK MUSKRAT GUARDS ITS MUSK

Any fan of the film The Wizard of Oz knows what makes the Hottentots so hot, and what makes the muskrat guard its musk. The secret, asserts Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion, is “courage.”

Lahr got it partly right. The muskrat defends its hindquarters, where its musk-producing glands loom, and the rest of its carcass, with the courage that typifies all wild animals. But there’s more to this semi-aquatic rodent’s persistence than moxie. A muskrat, after all, represents a tasty and satisfying meal for any fox, coyote, raccoon, mink, eagle, hawk, or owl that can catch it. To endure and to flourish, it must also excel in feeding, breeding, and maintaining a low profile.

Let’s consider these in reverse order. The muskrat is not flaming orange like a Baltimore oriole. It’s brown. And quiet. And like its far larger cousin, the beaver, the muskrat builds a lodge with one or more secure underwater entrances. Adirondack paddlers, motor-boaters, and hikers see muskrat lodges when they’re out adventuring. Generally, you tell a muskrat lodge from a beaver’s by the presence or absence of wood. Muskrats make lodges mainly out of soft-stemmed vegetation—cattail stalks, for example. Beavers favor woody stems, ones that look like they’ve been sharpened on both ends by a pencil-sharpener. Not all muskrats make lodges. Many live in burrows in banks.

We don’t see muskrats much partly because, in the presence of our species, they’re active mostly at night. If you do spot one, look for something that looks like a big vole, or field mouse, swimming in the water. The muskrat, in fact, is a vole, albeit a very large one. It’s cousin to our abundant meadow vole of open places and red-backed vole of the woods. The muskrat’s tail is narrow, unlike a beaver’s. In the water it trails behind the muskrat like a tailgating water snake. An adult muskrat usually weighs between two and four pounds. By contrast, a mature beaver (how one judges the maturity of a beaver is a subject for another day) may weigh thirty, fifty, or even eighty pounds.

As for breeding, Captain & Tennille didn’t sing about muskrat love for nothing. To put it politely, the muskrat is a paragon of fecundity. Dollops of musk, judiciously placed, seem to function like personal ads, telling other muskrats of an animal’s gender and reproductive inclinations. Females give birth to several litters of up to fourteen little ones in a year. The babies pop out blind and pink. In the South, muskrats start breeding at six months of age. Here in the cooler, more puritanical Adirondacks, a year is the norm.

If you still harbor doubts about the muskrat’s ability to make more muskrats, just ask a Netherlander. Muskrats were introduced to Europe by furriers early in the twentieth century. In a matter of decades they conquered much of the continent and began a rapid march across Asia. Muskrats cause much mischief in Holland, where their burrows inflict terrible damage on dikes that hold back the North Sea.

A whole lot of breeding, of course, demands a corresponding orgy of feeding. Muskrats excel at that, too. At our place along the Saranac River, evenings and mornings, I sometimes see a muskrat haul itself out of the water and gnaw the bark off a red-osier dogwood stem like we eat corn on the cob. The lion’s share of the animal’s diet consists of plant matter. Cattails, water lilies, pickerelweed, and arrowhead are heavily favored.

Yet the muskrat is no vegan. We see evidence of its taste for flesh when we’re out boating on lakes and rivers. Those piles of mussel shells you see along shorelines are not (for the most part) left by raccoons, as my Adirondack grandfather used to tell me when I was chasing bass and bullheads with him. To catch mussels effectively, you’ve got to be a good diver, something the raccoon is not. Muskrats can linger underwater for fifteen minutes. What do they do down there? In addition to grabbing mussels (many of the shell middens you see were formed under winter ice), they catch and gorge on fish, crayfish, frogs, and salamanders.

The muskrat’s motto seems to be “Carpe diem.” It lives moment to moment and enters the winter without stored food, or with very little. Contrast this with the busy and forward-thinking beaver. The beaver spends summer and fall laying up caches of edible limbs and twigs to tide it over the winter.

Which brings us back to courage. To live in the Adirondack Mountains and survive our long winters and short summers, an animal has to be brave, foolish, or both. The muskrat seems a little of each, fearless as any of the rest of us and improvident enough that, to survive the winter, it sometimes has to move in with a beaver or eat the insides of its own cozy domicile.

21. HOW RED SQUIRRELS PASS THE WINTER

In the woods recently, I was asked by a companion if red squirrels hibernate. It’s an excellent question. These compact rodents, living aboveground in some of the world’s coldest forests, could be forgiven for snoozing away our winters. Woodchucks and jumping mice, cousins of the red squirrel, go underground and check out for months. Yet the red squirrel does just the opposite. Instead of loafing, it cranks into high gear.

Why not? To a large degree, the red squirrel runs on conifer seeds. So while hard-core hibernators such as amphibians, reptiles, woodchucks, and jumping mice are settling in for their big sleeps, red squirrels power up to seize the annual bounty of cones. Spruces, firs, pines, tamaracks, and white cedars that have spent months or years conceiving and ripening the next generation of embryonic offspring suddenly move into the seed distribution business. As they do, cone scales that have long clung tightly to each other, shielding seeds developing beneath them, loosen up. Out fall would-be trees like snowflakes. They blow in the wind and drift all over the landscape.

But hold on! Scattered seeds aren’t what the squirrels are after, at least not for the most part. They want seeds by the cone-full. They’re easier to gather that way, and seeds are more readily consumed that way, too. Red squirrels devour conifer seeds impulsively, like we might eat popcorn, and they also stash large portions for the future. This makes sense. As evergreens and tamaracks gear up for parenthood, they often generate cones in staggering profusion, as they’re doing this winter following a wet spring and July. Red squirrels can’t devour all the trees’ seeds at once. So the nimble rodents turn proactive. They scamper up into the treetops, snip off cones ripe enough to have fully developed seeds inside but not so ripe as to be shedding them, and drop their prizes one by one to the ground.

Walk in conifer or mixed conifer-hardwood forests in autumn, and you’ll find cones dotting the ground wherever you look. Ski or snowshoe into the same woods in winter, and the cones have disappeared. It’s not just a matter of snow hiding them. Red squirrels have gathered the cones and stored them in caches called middens.

Red squirrel middens come in two types. There are middens consisting of unopened cones, put away as food for the future. A single midden of this kind may contain thousands of cones, sometimes as many as 15,000. And there are other sorts of middens, ones that, like American Indian oyster shell piles found along our coastlines, represent “empties” accumulated over dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of years. With red squirrels, this second kind of midden is a giant compost heap of cast-off cone scales. I’ve seen such middens that stood several feet high and measured six or eight feet across. Such a mound marks a spot where generations of red squirrels found conditions suitable for sitting, prying, and dining.

Compost generates heat. This fact, along with easy digging, is what likely draws American martens to red squirrel middens. The martens burrow in and create nooks—heated, insulated nooks—in which to rest.

Black bears may also dig in middens. The bears are stealing food, but they’re not the only cone thieves in the neighborhood. Red squirrels are not above raiding each other’s stashes. You should never take it personally when one of these handsome, sprightly rodents perches on a branch, bares its teeth, and chatters aggressively. It’s not threatening you, at least not likely. It’s delivering stern warnings to neighbors.

A sad and shocking fact about the life of the red squirrel is that only a fraction (about 22 percent, according to one estimate) survive to see their first birthdays. A big part of the trouble is surviving the winter. The season is cruel. Great numbers of red squirrels, especially young ones, starve to death. Which is why the rodents defend their food caches so vehemently, and why a critical factor in the life of a young squirrel may be the inheritance of a midden, and maybe also a feisty nature, from its mother.

Mother red squirrels often maintain several middens. As winter comes, they may concede mining rights to one or more of them to off-spring. It’s a tender gesture. It also represents good sense and enlightened self-interest on the mother’s part. Her offspring and their genes—in part, her genes—are her legacy.

I know people who despise red squirrels. Their logic fails to sway me. Yes, the furry rogues steal seeds put out for birds, they sometimes take over birdhouses, and they are not above invading attics. But we should cut them some slack. Food is fair game, and moving into sheltered spaces is what red squirrels, handsome and enterprising, are born to do. When I’m out in the woods working as a naturalist guide, and I’m trying to show that not all Adirondack wild animals are invisible, the intrepid rodent is often the only game in town. I’m grateful to every one that appears.

Maybe I also relate to the red squirrel because we’re both natural-born redheads. The red-brown thatch that covered my cranium until my forties earned me a nickname as a kid. Because my family pronounces our German surname to rhyme with the name for metal containers holding soup and soda, and because the cans of my youth were made of steel that oxidized, I was called “Rusty Kanze.” I didn’t let it bother me. I shared my hair color with the red squirrel, and that was all right with me.

22. A LITTLE RODENT OF EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD TASTE

If red-backed voles were displayed in a zoo, and if we could magnify their size a hundredfold, we’d line up to see them. But they’re not, and we can’t, so we don’t. Such a pity! No mammal more handsome makes its living in the Adirondack Mountains.

We exalt the rare and devalue the common. The less often we see a creature, the more excited we tend to get when we do see it. And if the beast is large, say, like a moose or black bear, we recount the thrill of seeing it again and again. Meanwhile, enormously abundant creatures scurrying at our feet such as the red-backed vole find themselves ignored.

Yet they’re out there, in astonishing quantity. An acre of forest may support two dozen. If you have your eyes open and take the time while hiking to soak up a little of the landscape, you’ll see them. Many of my finest red-backed vole sightings have taken place while catching my breath on steep sections of trail. I sit on a log, sip from a water bottle, chew my gorp (if you don’t know the acronym, it means “good old raisins and peanuts”), and catch a glimpse of something moving in the leaves.

It’s mouselike, yet not a mouse. Voles tend to have smaller external ears and shorter tails than deer mice and white-footed mice we’re familiar with. Voles and our common forest mice belong to the same rodent family, but scientists assign voles to the subfamily Arvicolinae, while deer and white-footed mice fall into the Neotominae. The fine points of distinguishing the two groups are best left embedded in the scientific literature. Suffice it to say that if you compare a red-backed vole you find in mossy woods to a deer mouse that surprises you in an outhouse, I’m confident you’ll see the rodents as members of two very different tribes.

I don’t hate mice, as some people do, yet they’re not favorites, either. They gnaw their way into our house, wriggle into our Toyota and our Pontiac, and in their wake leave not only droppings but also teeming hordes of tropical rat mites (an expert identified them for us), which bite and leave welts on certain members of the household. Red-backed voles, by comparison, hardly ever come inside. Mainly we see them where they belong, in the woods; at least we do if we stop moving and watch the ground at our feet. We admire red-backed voles beneath our bird feeders, too, where they rummage for fallen seed.

You know a red-backed vole when you see one because of its short tail, modestly proportioned ears, and the handsome, rusty wash of color that runs from its pleasingly rounded face down its back to the hind-quarters. The furry little thing might dart out into the open, wiggle its nose at you (catching a wiff), and then scurry off to a new place or back from whence it came. Red-backed vole populations expand dramatically in summer, so this is an especially good time to see them.

Unlike its cousin, the meadow vole, a champion borer of tunnels, the red-backed vole leads a more laid-back existence. It tends to follow already made tunnels and make nests in burrows dug by other rodents or by moles and shrews. Much of the time, the red-back simply rustles its way through the leaf litter, where you may hear it moving.

Mammalogists William J. Hamilton Jr. and John O. Whitaker Jr. report that red-backed voles have “predilections for green vegetation. We have examined many stomachs,” they write, “but seldom found insect remains, although the blackberries and raspberries which grow in the open woodland glades and the fallen blackberries provide many meals.” The voles seem to have a particular fondness, say Hamilton and Whitaker, for the leaves of Canada mayflower and bunchberry. These plants are widespread in the Adirondacks. Not by coincidence, so are the voles.

Red-backs are lusty characters. They breed from late winter to deep in the fall. Litters of baby voles average four or five but can include as many as eight. Mothers produce two or three litters per year. Newborn red-backed voles are tiny and nurse hungrily. In three weeks they’re woolly, spunky, and feeding on their own. A female red-backed vole may take on her first paramour sixty days after she’s born. Males tend to wait a little longer. Still, they’ve got to hurry. A vole’s life span is brief. A typical red-backed lives only a year.

If there’s one thing red-backed voles add to our forests, it’s animal protein. They take plant matter and convert it into flesh with marvelous efficiency. Not surprisingly, predators eagerly seek to consume that flesh. The list of red-backed vole diners includes foxes, coyotes, weasels, mink, skunks, and biologists.

Yes, biologists. Clinton Hart Merriam, a scientist who did pioneering work on Adirondack mammals in the nineteenth century, found these rodents not only palatable but tasty. William Hamilton, in a book on eastern mammals he coauthored with John Whitaker, describes the eating of red-backed voles with cool third-person detachment. “Hamilton,” he writes, “has sampled the meat but found the picking too lean to pass judgment on its merit.”

Stalking and studying small, elusive mammals in remote wild places is hard work. Apparently, it can give one an appetite.

23. THE WILD, WEIRD, ADIRONDACK OPOSSUM

If you see one, you may mistake it for someone’s lost, white, and dirty Angora cat. But look closely. You’ll find a ratlike beast looking up at you with an imbecilic grin. Step near and the animal may roll over and stick out its tongue.

On the other hand, if the creature is genuinely dead, you might examine its underside. I did this to a road-killed specimen in the Great Smoky Mountains once and discovered a pouch, its fleshy lid slightly ajar. Inside, still warm, wriggled a half-dozen or so pink baby opossums, each smaller than the average unshelled peanut.

Hard as it may be to believe, the opossum (Didelphis virginiana), a genuine marsupial, is an Adirondack native. It probably hasn’t prowled northern New York long, perhaps less than a century. Today, it turns up rarely in the park’s interior, where conditions there seem to be too cold for an animal with naked ears and thin fur, and where food supplies are unreliable. Around the periphery, however, where the weather is milder and more humans offer more unsecured garbage and compost, “possums” are locally common.

While to most of us, mammals that carry their young in pouches seem misplaced in the Adirondacks, biologists believed until recently that marsupials evolved in North America. As the story went, they evolved in our continental interior, dispersed around the globe, then became extinct in their homeland and extinct, too, in Europe and Asia. Three million years ago, a land bridge developed between the Americas and the marsupial tribe, in the form of the opossum, found its way home. Yet new finds offer fresh facts. Marsupial fossils 125 million years old discovered in China a few years ago predate their North American counterparts by twenty-five million years. Pouched animals, it turns out, may be originally Asian.

The opossum’s life abounds in surprises. For example, possums survive only two or three years, with the average age limit in the wild scarcely greater than one. Arthritis and blindness brought on by cataracts hasten their ends. By comparison, raccoons may live seven years or more.

Other odd facts: possums are apparently immune to the venom of North American pit vipers and can dine on rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths without fear. They can hang by their ratlike tails (because I read lots of animal books as a kid, prehensile appeared early in my vocabulary), and when frightened, they often “play possum.” This last act sometimes defeats its intended evolutionary purpose. Maintenance men in a park where I worked tore down a shed and found a “dead,” warm, and not-bad-smelling possum beneath the floor. They buried it—alive, it’s quite likely.

To North Americans, the possum’s child-rearing habits seem peculiar. Like all marsupials, the opossum delivers its young at a very early stage of development. Newborns, called neonates or larvae, are essentially fetuses. Like preemie humans, they require special care. Inside the pouch, to which they blindly crawl, they get it: warmth, milk (if they’re lucky enough to latch onto a nipple), and a safe place to grow. Baby possums pop out of the deep maternal interior about twelve days after conception. From the point of debouchment they crawl slowly and laboriously to the pouch. About two months later, they’re born again, so to speak.

Are marsupials primitive? It used to be thought so. Recently, however, scientists have taken a different view. Marsupial reproduction proves exquisitely suited for environmental conditions characterized by scant energy resources and frequent and fickle change. Rather than investing months in gestating young that may be born into hostile conditions, as most mammals do, marsupials pop their offspring out early. If times are lean, the young wither and die; if promising, they flourish. It’s a harsh but energy-efficient way of doing business.

Another truth about possums that may not be so true regards their intelligence. With their ragged coats, floppy ears, vacant stares, and toothy gapes, these are the most stupid-looking of animals. The skull seems to confirm the impression. The brain case is miniscule, hardly the size of a grape. But not so fast! Efforts by phrenologists a century ago to prove that humans with larger skulls were smarter than those with smaller are laughed at today. In the 1980s, scientists tested the ability of an assortment of animals to find food in a maze. Opossums outscored such famously sharp-witted creatures as rats and raccoons.

Where in the Adirondacks do opossums occur? I put the question to reliable informants, who then shared my query with others. Charlotte Demers, a biologist and Adirondack mammal expert at the Adirondack Ecological Center in Newcomb, said she’s never found evidence of possums in her part of the Adirondacks. John Washburn, proprietor with his wife Jane of the Trailhead Lodge in Benson, just outside Northville and just inside the Blue Line, reported the same. John “Mike” Peterson, distinguished Adirondack bird expert and naturalist, knew of an opossum roadkill on Spruce Hill in Keene, and his friend Greg Furness reported them common on Crown Point for about the last fifteen years.

The best Adirondack possum tale I’ve heard came to me from naturalist Gary Lee in Inlet. “I just had a report of one that trapped a lady in her house in Old Forge about a month ago,” he emailed. Snow and ice blocked her front door, so the possum barged onto the porch out back. The frightened woman called 911. Help arrived. While EMTs shoveled out the front door, the woman’s son-in-law caught the possum (which actually posed little risk) and hauled it safely outside.

24. ADIRONDACK SHREWS CAN’T BE TAMED

You never know where and when you’ll meet a shrew. Once, I was sitting at a desk in our house in the northern Adirondacks, minding my own business, when a lump of cinnamon-colored fur about the size of my thumb burst from beneath a closet door. In a twinkling it traced the room’s perimeter, then disappeared back under the door.

Based on size, shape, and color, the shrew I’d seen was likely the masked, Sorex cinereus. Six members of the tribe have been recorded in the Adirondack Park: the masked, the smoky, the long-tailed, the pygmy, the water, and the northern short-tailed.

My indoor shrew sighting was typical in several respects. It was fleeting. The shrew came and went. It was ambiguous. Shrews are difficult to distinguish in the field and in spare bedrooms. Even small mammal experts must often capture specimens and examine their jaws and teeth closely before they’re certain of the species they’re dealing with. And it provided a thrill. Shrews exist in great abundance across the Adirondacks in nearly every conceivable habitat, but because they’re often hidden beneath rocks, soil, and leaf litter, they’re only occasionally seen.

When shrews are noticed, they’re often mistaken for moles, which are larger and better-known. Yet telling them apart is easy. Moles have grossly oversized front feet, suggestive of human hands and used for digging. Shrews have tiny front feet. For the most part, they let other creatures excavate tunnels for them.

If human Adirondackers tend to know one thing about the shrews that live among us, it’s that they have nasty temperaments. Blame this partly on the English language. According to the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, shrew has long meant, in addition to a particular kind of small toothy mammal, a “wicked, evil-disposed or . . . vexatious person.” It’s been that way since 1290, fifty years before the birth of Chaucer.

Also blame the reputation of shrews on shrews. They’re small, often weighing only a fraction of an ounce, but are typically fierce and liable to assault and, if possible, devour anything in their paths. When I live-trap shrews in pit traps, I tend to catch several at a time. Invariably, one turns up alive, looking particularly well-fed, while the others lie dead, missing chunks of heads and torsos.

Aside from cannibalizing neighbors, some of whom are likely close relations, shrews eat a wide variety of things. They consume all manner of small wiggly creatures including insects, snails, centipedes, spiders, and earthworms. Specific menu items vary with species and habitat. The water shrew, for example, lives along bogs, lakeshores, riverbanks, streambanks, swamps, and marshes. Its diet includes fish and a substantial proportion of insect nymphs.

Two species of shrew have been recorded thus far in our backyard biological survey, and both have turned up in the house. The other is the northern short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda. Does the name sound familiar? During high school biology class, you may have learned that the short-tailed shrew is a venomous mammal.

Yes, you heard that right.

Venomous mammals running around the kitchen and living room? You bet. Do I fear for the well-being of my wife and children, and the integrity of my unprotected toes and ankles? Not really. Still, the facts give one pause. D. Andrew Saunders’s excellent Adirondack Mammals (Syracuse University Press, 1989) has this to say: “The neurotoxic saliva of the short-tailed shrew is a unique adaptation among North American mammals. Its poisonous bite is a result of secretions of the submaxillary glands which contain enough toxin to kill approximately 200 mice.” A 2003 study, conducted by a team of biologists in Japan, confirms that toxin of short-tailed shrews is “a lethal mammalian venom.” They call it BLTX and note that mice injected with it “developed irregular respiration, paralysis, and convulsions before dying.”

Egad! None of that sounds like fun. Fortunately, short-tailed shrews probably aren’t all that dangerous to us. A naturalist friend of mine handled one and was bitten on a forearm. No dire consequences resulted, but the wound did smart like a bee sting, the arm swelled nearly double, and the pain lingered for two weeks.

As for the threat to mice, I once conducted an impromptu experiment. I’d been keeping a short-tailed shrew in captivity, finding that it had an insatiable appetite for bologna. The shrew remained active around the clock, pausing every few minutes for a brief nap. One day, I live-trapped a mouse in a cupboard. Realizing I’d been handed an opportunity to witness the action of the shrew’s vaunted neurotoxic saliva, I dropped the mouse in the cage.

For an hour, until I could take no more and finally intervened, the shrew attacked without mercy. It nipped the mouse again and again until blood ran. The mouse never defended itself, and the shrew paused between assaults only long enough to take the occasional thirty-second-or-so snooze. As far as I could tell, the rodent suffered no ill effects other than flesh wounds. It remained frisky and bright-eyed. Perhaps bologna lacks a critical ingredient of BLTX, or potency varies among individual shrews, or some other variable wasn’t aligned for the stuff to work its dangerous magic.

25. PUTTING ON WINTER WHITES

The brown “rabbits” that hop around our backyard in the northern Adirondacks aren’t really rabbits at all. They’re hares—which, not to split hairs, give birth to open-eyed, ready-for-action young, as opposed to rabbits, which deliver their offspring blind and helpless. Our hares are snowshoes, also known as varying hares. We count on the fact that when winter comes, these oversized cousins of cottontails will turn snow-white and dissolve into the landscape, rarely to be sighted again until spring.

As the snowshoe hare goes, so goes the Adirondack ermine and long-tailed weasel. One mild day after a spell of cold, I flung open the kitchen door, only to find what looked like an animated sock scooting around the floor. The “sock” was actually a weasel, colored a gorgeous chestnut-brown on its face and back and milk-white down its belly. The fact that the weasel was generally petite and had a tail measuring about a third its body length identified it as an ermine. Long-tailed weasels, also found here, are nearly identical, but they’re longer, heftier, and sport tails about half their body length. The ermine was drawn to the kitchen by a sardine sandwich I was assembling on the counter.

It or one of its cousins was back again in January. This time the door was closed and the sardines were sealed tight in the pantry. What attracted the ermine was a chicken carcass, picked not very thoroughly of its cooked meat and left outside to feed winter birds. We discovered the ermine after noticing that something was pulling the carcass off the platform feeder and dragging it into the snow.

The recurrent ermine, like our backyard hares, was colored white, making it all but impossible to see as it streaked through fresh snow. Only a dark nose and coal-black tail tip broke up the color scheme.

The invisibility in snow of the ermine, and of unrelated animals such as the snowshoe hare, give rise to a widely held belief that these animals turn from brown to white in order to cloak themselves in winter camouflage. It’s an appealing theory, one that seems to dovetail neatly with the facts. But it may not offer the whole truth.

Scientists have discovered that white fur, and also white feathers, offer animals that live in freezing climates something perhaps more valuable than camouflage. They provide superior insulation. In places such as our backyard, where the temperature has been known to plunge below –40 Fahrenheit, insulation is a lifesaver. It holds in heat and reduces its owner’s need to eat at a time when food resources are at their scarcest.

Why is white warmer? The answer lies in the structure of hair, and of the fine divisions, or barbules, that make up bird feathers. Colored hair and colored feathers contain a pigment called melanin. Remove it, and you not only turn the animal white, but you create empty space inside each hair or barbule.

The presence of air space within individual hairs and barbules reduces their ability to disperse heat. As a result, a snowshoe hare, ermine, or long-tailed weasel keeps considerably warmer inside its white winter coat than it would if it retained the brown summer pelage.

No Adirondack bird turns white in winter, but to our north, around Hudson Bay and beyond, rock and willow ptarmigan (chicken-like birds related to our ruffed and spruce grouse) molt their scalloped brown plumages at summer’s end and dress for the long subarctic winter in toasty white.

Given the thermal advantages of turning white in winter, it’s a wonder more animals don’t make the change. But then, perhaps it’s not a matter of black and white. White-tailed deer don’t bleach towhead blond in winter, but they do trade in their fine, cinnamon-colored summer coats for coarse gray winter coats. The gray hairs are much less pigmented than the summer ones. In fact, they’re mostly hollow. The whitetail thus meets the ermine and the hare halfway, surrendering some but not all of its color for warmth.

To date, no study has actually proven that the animals who turn white in winter do so for reasons of heat retention rather than camouflage. Geography provides little help. For example, where I lived for several years on the Mississippi coast, long-tailed weasels remain brown year-round. Yet it’s hard to say whether a lack of snow’s the reason, or a lack of cold. A January day in Ocean Springs often warms to 65 Fahrenheit, and flowers bloom in window boxes. Snow? Parents drive hours north to show their kids a dusting.

Here in the Adirondacks, the truth perhaps lies in both directions. Small, edible animals such as the snowshoe hare and the ermine undoubtedly benefit from the camouflage of their winter whites, the hare because it’s harder for owls, foxes, and hunters to see it, the ermine for that reason and the additional one that it’s a predator, to whom invisibility would convey an advantage when creeping up on prey. Warmth? That’s a boon, too. On mornings when the thermometer reads 30 below 0, we see our backyard ermine coming and going, looking supremely comfortable in its insulated coat of white.

26. WHO HIBERNATES, WHO DOESN’T, AND WHY

Some years back, Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens tagged a controversial earmark item onto a bill. Its purpose was to supply $2 million to the University of Alaska to study the genetic basis of hibernation. Stevens’s colleague in the Senate, John McCain, howled in protest. So did half the news media.

Why the fuss? If this is pork, I propose it’s pork of the best grade. What in the realm of animal behavior holds more interest for humans in general, and Adirondack people in particular, than hibernation? None of us can do it. Yet if we could figure out how certain animals manage to shift into states close to death for months at a time, later to awake refreshed and unharmed, our chances of traveling beyond the solar system (not to mention surviving high winter fuel prices) would brighten.

In the cold Adirondacks, where the ice age of winter can last more than half the year, so-called cold-blooded or ectothermic animals must either close up shop during the cold months, go somewhere warmer, or die. This is why in winter, except on unusually warm days, we don’t see insects, spiders, reptiles, and amphibians. We do see fish (if we ice-fish), but thanks to the peculiar chemistry of water, only the tops of ponds and lakes freeze, allowing creatures beneath the ice to carry on, albeit at a diminished pace.

As for Adirondack homeotherms, or “warm-blooded” animals, most of us tough out the long freeze. Only a few have mastered the art of switching off in autumn and on again in spring. These are the animals we call hibernators.

No bird in northern New York hibernates, as far as we know, although in the deserts of the American Southwest, a cousin of our nighthawk called the poorwill has been found, in periods of extended cold, in a deathlike state. The first such poorwill found could not be awakened. No breathing or heartbeat could be detected. The bird’s temperature flatlined far below normal. Still, eighty-eight days after its discovery, the poorwill stirred and flew away.

Hibernation has more than one definition. The word and its original meaning predate by centuries or more the technical definitions that scientists superimpose. The popular sense, that of a long winter sleep from which the sleeper can under most circumstances not be easily awakened, provides as good a definition as any.

Our champion Adirondack hibernators are two species of jumping mice: the woodland and the meadow. These long-tailed rodents start snoozing profoundly in their subterranean dens as early as mid-September. They reappear in May. That feat represents an astonishing seven or eight months of down time.

My naturalist friend John Serrao, digging a hole one day near his home in Pennsylvania, found a jumping mouse that looked all right but did not waken. Curious, he brought it home. The mouse did not rouse, and John set it up comfortably in a container and popped it in the fridge. John visited lots of schools in those days, and he had an exciting idea. Why not show students the profundity of hibernation by letting them see the torpid mouse up close for themselves? This he did, keeping the animal snug between classes in a cooler and returning it at night to his refrigerator. For months, the oblivious mouse went to school. Hundreds of kids got to see and touch it. When spring came, right on schedule, the jumping mouse opened its eyes, none the worse for its adventures but perhaps remembering peculiar dreams.

Woodchucks, which are a kind of marmot, are deep hibernators also. In our neck of the North Woods, we start noticing the absence of woodchucks in early October and likely won’t see them again until March. During that time, woodchucks slumber underground in hibernacula they’ve dug out with their claws. Their temperatures fall close to freezing, and their pulses ebb to four or five a minute. If you dug one up, you might not be able to wake it.

Among our bats, two species, the hoary and the red, depart around the time autumn frosts purge the air of insects. The latest we’ve noted a migrating red bat at our house was the third of November, 2001. All our other bats—the little brown, the big brown, the silver-haired, the small-footed, the Indiana, Keen’s myotis, and the eastern pipistrelle—pass the winter hibernating in abandoned mines and natural wintering sites away from the worst of wind and cold. Unfortunately, congregating makes these bats vulnerable to white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease currently decimating bats here and across the country.

Which leaves us with that most famous hibernator, the bear.

Do black bears hibernate? By the popular definition, yes. By a narrower view, one that terms “true hibernators” animals whose body temperatures, heart rhythms, and respiratory rates plunge to near those of death, bears fail to make the grade. They sleep prodigiously in their dens during winter but may rouse themselves and venture out on occasion, leaving tracks in the snow.

If this pattern of extended lethargy doesn’t qualify as hibernation, it surely comes close. A bear passes the winter without defecating, urinating, eating, or drinking. (I challenge any scientist who says bears don’t hibernate to try this himself or herself.) The bruin’s body temperature drops about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, metabolism slows by half or more, and fat is consumed. By spring, the animal has lost up to a quarter of its weight.

Why do some creatures hibernate and others not? The answer remains unclear. Certainly when winter pulls the ecological rug out from beneath an animal and its food supply dwindles, limited options remain. Hibernation may be risky because hibernacula are hard to find or make, and a hibernating animal lies unable to eat, drink, or defend itself for months at a time. Still, at least for homeotherms, which burn a lot of calories keeping warm, hibernation makes a certain amount of sense.

27. MERRIAM’S MAMMALS OF THE ADIRONDACKS

Pick a field guide, any field guide, to North American mammals. In the book you’ll find a name popping up again and again: Merriam. Six living mammals of the West—Merriam’s chipmunk, Merriam’s deer mouse, Merriam’s pocket mouse, Merriam’s kangaroo rat, Merriam’s shrew, and Merriam’s ground squirrel—plus a now-extinct subspecies of elk honor the career of Clint Hart Merriam. Ironically, while “Hart Merriam,” as he was known, cut his incisors as a biologist in the Adirondacks, no mammal in his home woods bears his name.

Merriam was born in 1855 in New York City, where his parents were spending the winter. He spent most of his early life in Locust Grove, a hamlet about four miles outside the present Adirondack park boundary in Leyden Township. Merriam’s father, Clinton Levi Merriam, had left the family farm there, made a fortune on Wall Street, and moved back to Locust Grove to raise his growing family. The elder Merriam served two terms in the US House of Representatives. Government connections allowed him to introduce his nature-loving son to Spencer Fullerton Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. This connection landed young Merriam, at age seventeen, a job on a government survey expedition to the Yellowstone country.

Hart Merriam relished his adventures in the Wild West. He proved his worth to the expedition by collecting and preparing 313 bird skins and sixty-seven birds’ nests.

Back home, it was time for the young man of promise and means to get an education. Merriam earned an undergraduate degree at Yale, then an MD at Columbia. Still a passionate naturalist, he found time while in med school to found, along with John Burroughs and others, the Linnaean Society of New York. It was, and is, a club for serious naturalists. Members elected Merriam its first president.

Returning to Locust Grove and the Adirondack woods he loved to roam, Merriam settled into life as a country doctor. He kept at it from 1879 to 1885. During this time, he did more than stitch wounds and set broken bones. In 1881, Merriam published a “Preliminary List of the Birds of the Adirondacks.” The following year, Merriam, marking a shift in his primary interest from birds to mammals, joined the Linnaean Society in publishing the first half of the work for which northern New York best remembers him.

“The Vertebrates of the Adirondack Region, Northeastern New York,” by Clinton Hart Merriam, MD, appeared in 1882 and 1884. “In the following pages,” the author begins confidently, “forty-two species of mammals are enumerated in the Adirondack region, and it is not probable that future investigation will greatly augment this number. With the exception of one or two additional Shrews, and two or three Bats, I know of no others that are likely to be found.” On this score, as in most matters biological, Merriam spoke accurately and with prescience.

Today, it’s fascinating to browse Merriam’s Adirondack mammal report, sample his engaging prose, and ponder the differences and similarities between the mammals flourishing or diminishing in the Adirondacks in the 1880s and those roaming the woods today. From page seventeen of the first volume:

Here is a sparkling trout stream, perhaps the outlet of a mountain lake; let us follow its winding course through yonder thicket of alders. Working our way through the tangled bushes we soon emerge into the open grassy bottom of one of the most beautiful and interesting of nature’s adornments—a Beaver meadow.

Merriam continues, giving us a sense of the change from his time to ours.

Here, less than a century ago, might have been heard the splash and seen the hut of the sagacious Beaver. But, like the Moose that once roamed these mighty forests, they have, excepting a few isolated individuals, been exterminated or driven beyond our borders, till now these green meadows . . . are about all that remain to remind us of the former existence here of one of the most curious, interesting, and typical of North American mammals.

If he were alive today, Merriam would be overjoyed to learn of the beaver’s resurgence.

In the 1884 volume, Merriam states that to the best of his knowledge, beavers persisted in the Adirondacks in only two locations: along the Raquette River between Raquette Falls and Tupper Lake, and on a stream feeding the West Branch of the St. Regis.

Mountain lions? “It is not many years since the Cougar or Panther . . . was a common inhabitant of the primeval forests of the Adirondacks,” writes Merriam in 1882, “but . . . so many more have been killed than born that they are now well nigh exterminated.” He adds that “a few still remain” while predicting their ultimate extirpation.

Merriam reports that the lynx, “as so far as I can learn, has always been a rather rare inhabitant of this region.” Regarding wolves, Merriam says that “comparatively few . . . are now to be found in the Adirondacks, though twelve years ago [1870] they were quite abundant. . . . Within my recollection Wolves were so common here that scarcely a night passed when they could not be heard howling in various parts of the forest. So bold and impudent were they that they often came about camp while the inmates were sleeping and stole any venison, or other meat, that chanced to hang within reach.”

Merriam writes of a bounty put on wolf scalps by New York State in 1872. He observes that while few wolves were killed by bounty hunters (only forty-eight bounties were paid in the eleven-year span between June 1871 and July 1882), wolves at this time diminished dramatically in number. He calls this turn of events an “inexplicable mystery,” adding, “There is but one direction in which they could have escaped, and that is through Clinton County into Lower Canada. . . . There is no evidence that they made any such journey.”

Merriam goes on to list all the Adirondack mammals he had reliable records for, and to give bits of information and anecdote about them. He includes red fox but not gray, fisher, marten (“a common resident of the dark evergreen forests of the Adirondacks”), least weasel, ermine, mink, and skunk. In a grisly aside, Merriam gives instruction on how to kill skunks with a sharp blow to the back so as to avoid getting sprayed. “I speak with some confidence on this point, having myself killed upwards of a hundred skunks in the manner above recommended.”

Otters were common in Merriam’s day. So were raccoons and black bears. About bears kept by natives as pets, he opines that “their dispositions are not of the gentlest type, and in growing old, they are apt, at times, to become obstinate and unruly.” One wonders what Merriam was like in his old age. He lived to be eighty-seven.

White-tailed deer? Merriam reports them “so abundant in most parts of the Adirondacks that they outnumber all the other large animals together.” Moose? “It is not many years,” he writes, “since the Moose . . . was a favorite object of pursuit in the Adirondacks, from which region it was exterminated, as nearly as I can ascertain, about the year 1861.” In the year Fort Sumter fell and the Civil War began draining northern New York’s villages of young men, Merriam says that the last Adirondack moose, or at least very likely the last, was a cow shot and killed on the Marion River, near Raquette Lake.

The biggest surprise in Merriam’s annotated inventory of Adirondack mammals is the harbor seal. He notes that the animal was reported by reliable observers in Lake Champlain in 1810 and 1846. Elk are included, too, although the well-preserved antler “found in a bog on Third Lake of Fulton Chain” cited by Merriam likely represents a creature of postglacial times that was gone well before European settlement. Merriam also reports the 1877 discovery, in the village of Copenhagen just west of the mountains, of a tusk nearly six feet in length. It almost certainly belonged to a mammoth.

Merriam’s biographer Wilfred H. Osgood called him “the central figure in a dynamic era connecting the pioneer period of exploration with the present time of experimentation and interpretation.” So he was, especially after he gave up doctoring to work full-time for the US Biological Survey and, later, the Smithsonian Institution. Still, we in the Adirondacks claim him as our own. He launched his career in our wild and moody woods and returned as often as commitments allowed. To Merriam we will always turn for perspective on the way things were and the way they might be again.

28. LAST BUT NOT LEAST, THE BOG LEMMINGS

When most of us give thought to Adirondack mammals, we tend to think big. The moose comes first to mind, or the black bear, with the white-tailed deer running a close second or third. But hey, what about the bog lemming? It’s abundant, it’s ecologically important as an herbivore and an unwitting food source for predators, and it’s even good-looking. Still, this mini-mammal tends to be ignored by just about everyone.

There are furry, mother’s-milk-producing animals in the park smaller than bog lemmings. The pygmy shrew, for example, can be the size of a bumblebee and weigh only two grams, or seven-hundredths of an ounce. By contrast, a hefty southern bog lemming might weigh fifty grams, or not quite two ounces. Still, more of us have a sense of sharing the woods with shrews than with the humble, unobtrusive bog lemming.

In the Adirondacks bog lemmings keep so far below the radar even of biologists that no one can be certain at this point how many species we have. There are two candidates. The southern bog lemming, Synaptomys cooperi, is named for William Cooper, the same nineteenth-century biologist who leant his name to the Cooper’s hawk. To date, despite a few mistaken identifications, all bog lemmings recorded in the park and documented by specimens have been southerns, according to my friend Larry Master, a zoologist and conservation biologist with deep experience in the Adirondacks. Southern bog lemmings have been recorded widely here below 4,400 feet.

The other possible bog lemming in our midst is the northern, S. borealis. According to Master, this species is known from a few high-elevation sites in Maine and New Hampshire, but no one has managed to document its presence in New York. Is it here? Master suspects that it is. He says he looks forward to working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation or New York Natural Heritage Program colleagues to locate the animal in bogs high on one or more Adirondack peaks.

How to tell a northern from a southern? It’s tricky. Specimens must be examined closely. Northern bog lemming females have eight nipples. Southerns have six. The northern also tends to have distinctly pale hairs at the base of each ear and a palate that comes to a sharp point. Southerns have broad, blunt-pointed palates and triangular shapes on the outer sides of their lower molars. Northerns lack these triangles.

Unless you own a pussycat that slaughters small mammals for amusement and hauls the carcasses home, your chances of ever seeing a bog lemming are slim. The animals spend most of their lives underground, running around sprawling networks of burrows. Each southern bog lemming has shaggy brown or chestnut fur on its back and silver fur on the underside. Like voles, bog lemmings have eyes and ears so small that they tend to get lost in the pelage. Native deer mice and white-footed mice, by contrast, sport big, bulbous eyes and extravagant, Mickey Mouse ears.

The most widely occurring Adirondack mammal that looks a good deal like a bog lemming is the meadow vole. Meadow voles are heavier and generally larger—six or seven inches long as opposed to four to four and a half for a bog lemming. Another key difference concerns tail length. The meadow vole has a tail that extends about a third its body length. The bog lemming’s is so short it hardly sticks out at all.

While southern bog lemmings are all but invisible to humans, at least for practical purposes, they leave telltale signs that help biologists of the Sherlock Holmes school locate them. It’s elementary. You look for clues of three types.

The most conspicuous come in the form of tidy little piles of cut stems. Southern bog lemmings dine off a diverse menu that includes the stalks of grasses and sedges, assorted leaves, seeds, berries, fungi, bark, and insects. Saving for the future, they stash stems along runways in one to three inch lengths. These can be giveaways.

The other clues are stacks of leaf blades and rice-grain-sized scats that are colored a vivid green. The droppings of other Adirondack rodents are generally dark. When green ones turn up, you can be pretty sure they’re the effluent of bog lemmings.

Habitat for the northern bog lemming tends to be high-altitude bogs. For the southern, the picture is more varied. Southern bog lemmings are found in sphagnum bogs at times, yet more often they turn up on grassy hillsides, in marshes, in orchards, and in hardwood and mixed conifer-hardwood forests.

The lemmings of fame and legend, the ones whose dramatic population swings push their numbers to suicidal proportions at times, are the collared lemmings (Dicrostonyx spp.) of the Old and New World Arctic. Our bog lemmings, thank evolution, reproduce at a more measured pace.

PART TWO

THESE HAVE FEATHERS

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1. RACE WITH A DUCK

It wouldn’t be fair, would it, to race a duck with a car? That’s what I thought until yesterday. The duck wouldn’t have a chance.

I was driving our Toyota Camry parallel to the Saranac River on my way to Saranac Lake (which, as it happens, is a village, not a lake) when my left eyeball picked up the duck, flapping at high speed and at a steady altitude fifty feet above the river. At first the bird was flying at an angle to me. Then it veered to follow the river and parallel the road, and suddenly it had most of my attention.

It was a merganser; of that I was sure. Since I’m no great expert at naming ducks on the wing, and since the lighting was against me, all I could be certain of is that the bird had the long skinny bill typical of a common or red-breasted merganser, and it was about the right size. Surely it was one or the other; probably a common, because commons are common hereabouts and red-breasteds are not.

The duck couldn’t possibly keep up, could it? I was driving the speed limit in a 45 mph zone.

As I zoomed along, the duck zoomed with me. I was sure I would gain on it, but the opposite happened. The duck gained on me. Eventually it peeled off to the right, crossing over the road in front of me. The pace of its wingbeats was astonishing. It wearied me just to watch them and think of all the calories—and indirectly fish, for mergansers are piscivores—the wing muscles were burning.

I could hardly wait to get home and investigate the subject of duck flight speed in my favorite book of bird lore, John Terres’s magnificent The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds. Reference books are out of fashion these days, buried by the internet. All the same, I still reach for Terres. This book was his life’s work, and it’s a humdinger, the product of a tireless researcher, former editor of Audubon magazine, and first-rate writer.

Terres came through, as always. He reported: “A male red-breasted merganser, pursued by Max C. Thompson (1961) in an airplane in n. Alaska, attained a top airspeed of 80 mph along a river for 1,500 feet before turning aside. With a wind of 20 mph assisting the bird, Thompson reported its ground speed at 100 mph.” The peregrine falcon, which has been clocked in a dive at 175 mph, has the merganser beat. Still, the merganser would risk a speeding ticket if traveling at that pace on an interstate highway.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Why was the merganser I saw blasting along at such a rate? I saw no predator in pursuit, and no menacing cold front loomed over the next hill. It was baffling. Perhaps this was a young bird, feeling its oats (or, in this case, its minnows), putting itself to the test.

Terres supplied other numbers, too. He wrote that crows and their relatives are known to fly up to 45 mph, buntings 37 mph, starlings 49 mph, and geese 45 mph. How slow can a bird fly? That’s an interesting question, too. If an airplane moves forward too slowly, it stalls and falls.

“Of all flight speeds measured by Schnell,” Terres tells us, “that of the house sparrow was one of the slowest at 16–19 mph. Apparently the minimal speed of birds in order to remain airborne is about 16 1/2 feet per second, or about 11 mph.”

I always thought the peregrine falcon was the world’s fastest animal, speedier even than Africa’s cheetah. But Terres disagreed. “The swiftest straight-forward, wing-beating flight of any bird ever reported,” he wrote, was made by a western bird, a spine-tailed swift. Two flights were clocked by a scientist. One racked up a jaw-dropping ground speed of 172 mph, the other 218 mph.

Wow!

2. THE MONSTER IN THE WOODSHED

Back in the dark ages before I wired a pair of floodlights to light up our woodshed after dark, heating our house required a trip or two every night from the kitchen door fifty feet or so through inky blackness to our roofed-over wood storage room without walls. “A trip or two” carries double meaning. Shining a flashlight and staggering under an armload of hardwood generally couldn’t be accomplished at the same time, at least not well. The lighting usually suffered, and so, especially when ice covered the ground, did the hindquarters.

One memorable night late in winter, I roused myself about midnight, put down the book I was reading, and shuffled out to retrieve the woodstove’s last meal. I was about to step into the impenetrably dark shed when I heard something move. It was only a rustle, perhaps the slight movement of a deer mouse, so without concern I took another step. Something in the shed hissed loudly. I experienced a sudden chill and a convulsion of goosebumps.

I’m groggy at midnight, but not stupid. Beating a retreat to the house, I grabbed a handheld spotlight and returned. This time, the thing hissed again before I got close. I switched on the light. What I saw made me laugh out loud.

Opportunities like this don’t come often, so I hurried back to retrieve my naturalist wife. This was before kids when we could afford to be night owls. She was awake and reading, too. I knew she’d be interested and amused. All I told her was that something hissed at me in the woodshed, and she might want to have a look. I promised her the wild thing that hissed wouldn’t attack a woman in pajamas.

Debbie padded out in slippers. I lingered behind in the lighted kitchen. Seconds later, I heard a whoop. She burst back in, smiling. “What on earth is a mallard duck doing in our woodshed?” It was a question I couldn’t answer.

These events occurred as winter was turning to spring. The river that flows past our house was still frozen, or so we thought. But perhaps an open pool upstream or downstream, hidden from our view, had caught the duck’s attention. In late winter, the first breaks in the river’s lid of ice expose black liquid that must shout to ducks passing high overhead. They drop down to investigate, and as a result, we get early looks at mallards, hooded mergansers, and wood ducks. Perhaps this mallard drake swooped down late in the day, got caught out after dark, and waddled up to our shed seeking shelter.

Then again, maybe the bird had another motive. Mallards eat aquatic plants for the most part, although they’re not averse to live escargot, mussels, insect nymphs, tadpoles, and fish. In farm country, they’ll sometimes drop into stubble and pick for seeds. We’re not farmers, but we do lay out sunflower seed all winter to feed songbirds. It’s possible the mallard came to enjoy a snack and took lodging for the night as an afterthought.

Either way, the mallard was welcome to stay and hiss as long as it needed to. We looked for it the next night and the next, but without success. As we were telling our side of the story to get laughs out of friends, perhaps the duck floated on a thawed pond somewhere, quacking out a tale to its mate, a frightening story of a dark night, a promising shelter, and a sudden rude awakening.

3. LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

Five hours past sunset, the temperature plunged toward 0 Fahrenheit as I trudged from the house to my writing studio. A few snowflakes were falling, adding to the four of five inches of fresh powder that blanketed the ground. Clouds circled the night sky like a wreath.

Straight up, all was clear. In the open sky I was able to pick out a few dim stars and a bright moon. Moonshine imparted a ghostly glow to the black-and-white world that surrounded me.

“What’s that?” I might have said to a companion. “Do you hear what I hear?” The night’s silence had been broken by a sound. It was a drumbeat. Instead of holding to a tempo, as human drummers usually do, this percussionist raced faster and faster until he could accelerate no more. Then his volume diminished. The soft thumping fell away. Again, it was a silent night. All was calm. All was bright.

The drumming I heard was so faint that I wondered if I’d imagined it. Then it came again. “Do you hear what I hear?” I would have said to a companion. The beats floated out of the snowy woods, heaven and nature singing and thumping in harmony.

Moving along, I knew it was late and time to go gentle into the good night. (Or gently, to improve on Dylan Thomas and get the adverb right.) The beats came again, more loudly this time. There was no mistaking them now. Either the drummer was playing more forcefully, or he had changed direction, or my hearing had somehow grown more sharp.

Do you know what I know? If you’re a watcher of a birds, and a listener to them, too, you know whose performance I heard that night. You know that this cousin of the turkey and the chicken beats its rich, mellow drum throughout the year. Until then, I’d never heard it in winter.

The little drummer boy was a male ruffed grouse. If I could have spied him, I’d have seen a vaguely chicken-like bird, boldly patterned in gray, black, brown, and white. He’d have had a crest on his head, a black band across the end of his tail, and would stand about a foot high. Each of his toes would have been fringed with structures called pectinations. These grow as winter comes on. They serve the bird as snowshoes.

Somewhere out among the moon shadows, the grouse stood on a rotting log, probably one carpeted with moss. From visits I’d had with others of his kind, I knew he launched into each burst of percussion by cocking his tail, then lowering it, then raising his wings like an orchestra conductor. Next he’d cup his wings as we might cup our hands and with great force pull them swiftly downward and in toward his sides. This would make the first drumbeat. Over and over he’d repeat the downbeats, the tempo rapidly increasing.

Then it would be over. A message had been delivered. The male grouse would then survey the landscape, rest, and compose himself for the next performance. It might come a few seconds later. It could wait for months.

All this had to do with romance, of course, even though, on that frigid winter night, I doubt the Romeo had much of a chance of warming a female’s heart. Then why drum? Maybe he was doing it to lay the groundwork for love in springtime. Maybe he was asserting his right like a king of old to lord over a domain and drive away rivals. Maybe he was cold and wanted to warm up, and this was the best way to do it.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, because it was Christmastime and from the house he’d heard that most unlikely pair, Bing Crosby and David Bowie, pa-rum-pum-pum pumming on a set of loudspeakers, he couldn’t resist joining in.

4. RETURNING THE NATIVE

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Trailing a convoy of pickup trucks, our low-slung Prius followed a pair of wheel ruts through dense woods. We were heading to a location whose exact coordinates I promised not to divulge. Without giving away too much, I can say that the place was miles deep in the spruce, fir, and tamarack woods north of the village of Tupper Lake. My kids, Ned, then twelve, and Tasman, then eleven, and I had no clear idea where we were going. Fortunately, the team of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation biologists, SUNY Potsdam professor Glenn Johnson, and assorted field hands we were accompanying had worked out the logistics.

The occasion was momentous. We were on hand to witness the release of wild Canadian spruce grouse into the Adirondack woods. With the blessing of Canadian wildlife authorities, the birds had been captured in a spruce-grouse-rich forest in Ontario. Biologists had lured the birds with recordings, then lassoed them with soft nooses mounted at the ends of poles. To minimize stress, the birds were boxed individually, chauffeured to the border, tested in the dead of night to confirm they were healthy, and whisked into northern New York around 9:30 in the morning. The idea was to liberate them, pronto.

At the release site, chosen by Angelena Ross of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Spruce Grouse Recovery team she heads, the group split in two. Several biologists went one way with one set of birds, while Ned, Tasman, and I marched in another with Ross, her colleague Glenn Johnson of SUNY Potsdam (a key player in Adirondack spruce grouse studies and recovery efforts), John Ozard, a DEC biologist up from Albany, and Andrea Pedrick, a citizen participation specialist for DEC in Watertown.

Our birds, five of them, were a mix of females and juveniles. They waited quietly in cheery blue cardboard boxes that looked like the containers pet stores send you home with when you buy parakeets or guinea pigs. A hush descended. The banter that had prevailed during the drive gave way to thoughtful silence. No one told us to be quiet. It was instinctive and probably best for the birds.

Ross, clutching a blue box in one hand and a radio receiver in the other, led the way. Single file, we tramped and crackled through a tangle of balsam and spruce. It was dark despite the midday hour and a bright sun overhead. Eventually a GPS reading told the experts we had arrived.

Out of a box placed on the ground stepped a female, timidly. The biologists had affixed a tiny transmitter to the bird. Its slender antenna trailed over her back. This was only the second spruce grouse I’d ever seen. The first had also been a female, dust bathing along the old railroad bed that runs through the Bloomingdale Bog, not far from our home. That grouse stood a couple of hundred feet away. This one was separated from us by inches. Ned, Tasman, and I stood transfixed.

The spruce grouse is an archetypal bird of boreal, or northern, forests of spruce, fir, tamarack, and heaths such as blueberry and sheep-laurel. It looks a good deal like its much more common cousin, the ruffed grouse. But there are important differences. The spruce grouse’s tail is noticeably shorter, and its overall size is smaller, the body more compact. The ruffed grouse has an angular crest on top of its head. The spruce grouse does not. An adult male spruce grouse is easy to recognize. He’s got a black breast and a bright red fleshy patch over each eye. But the birds we cheered on as they immigrated were not adult males. One feature we could see was a tan fringe to the tail feathers, very different than the wide black band that spans the outer reaches of a ruffed grouse’s tail.

These Canadian spruce grouse were gorgeous, their feathers an intricate mix of black, gray, white, and tan. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” the kids said, as if reading from the same script.

We hoped the birds the recovery team liberated this day would go on to live long lives and multiply. So did Ross, Johnson, and DEC. The aim of DEC’s 2012 Spruce Grouse Recovery Plan is to help the Adirondacks’ small, scattered populations of the birds recover from a century-long decline. The release we joined was the second this year, the third from Canada, and the sixth overall. And more birds are coming.

Given that climate change may partly account for the birds’ slipping numbers, I began the day with doubts about the value of the recovery effort. But that was before venturing out with Ross and Johnson, before reading the plan, and before ogling the birds up close.

Now I get it. The birds have a long history in the Adirondacks. Because there’s a likelihood that past logging practices contributed to the spruce grouse’s Adirondack decline, the tide might turn in the birds’ favor if we give them a little help. Having learned this, I now applaud the recovery plan. It seems very much worth a try. A healthy spruce grouse population in the Adirondacks would be good for the birds, and it would be a fine thing for humans, too. Bird watchers are big spenders. High on everyone’s list of Adirondack wanna-sees is the smaller and far more elusive of our two grouse, the one that gorges on namesake spruce needles, and that dines on fir, tamarack, blueberries, and insects, too.

5. THE FAMILY LIFE OF LOONS

If there’s one bird native to our Northeast that thrills just about every observer, it’s the uncommonly beautiful common loon. You can’t ogle a loon if your aesthetic sensibilities are firing on all cylinders and not be astounded by its elaborate black-and-white markings and flaming red eyes. But there’s more. When the bird pivots or the light shifts, patches of plumage that seemed black flash shimmering purple or metallic-green.

Loons come and go through southern New York on their way between cold, clear wilderness lakes in the Adirondacks, northern New England, and Canada and winter ranges along the Atlantic coast. On northern lakes in spring, males and females court, set up territories, and mate. And there females lay green, dark-blotched eggs.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Loons are specialized for life on and under water, so nature has mounted their legs toward their sterns, not underneath their bellies like those of ducks. So while a mallard can pad with reasonable grace onto dry land and have a look around, a loon remains confined to water. The exceptions are females preparing to lay eggs.

When Mother Loon comes on land, she does so very marginally and awkwardly. (“Loon,” writes Ernest Choate in his Dictionary of American Bird Names, “is a corruption of Shetland, loom,” a word whose origin he traces to the Icelandic lomr or the Swedish lame, “for the awkward walk of the bird on land.”) Pushing with her powerful legs, a gravid female slides her ample belly out of the water and up the gentlest of slopes. There, inches or at most a few feet from the water, she plunks down her embryonic, calcium-encapsulated offspring.

The incubation of the one or two eggs lasts nearly a month. If all goes well, the egg or eggs hatch. A loon family I had the privilege of observing and photographing one recent summer produced only a single chick. In short order, the hatchling or hatchlings toddle off to the water.

There they swim without lessons, and there they quickly grow fatigued. It’s fun to watch a parent loon raise a wing at the approach of a tiny brown hatchling not quite the size of a tennis ball and just as fuzzy, and to see the hatchling flop onto the parent’s lowered flank and wriggle into riding position.

Sometimes the hatchling sits in the rumble seat, near the rear, often gazing backward. Sometimes it advances to a snug spot just behind its parent’s neck. It’s not unusual for a chick to doze there for a while, and then to waken, squirm, and jump back into the drink.

Both loon parents are attentive to the offspring. The loon family I observed spent long stretches of time as a threesome, with each parent catching small fish and crayfish and offering them to the loon-let. Sometimes the item was too large, and after exhausting its patience, the parent bird swallowed the tidbit itself.

It’s probably no coincidence that the loon family I spent several afternoons with a few summers ago tended to turn up again and again in the same cove, one dusted with thousands of hatchling water striders. Until then, I never thought of loons as insect eaters. Yet again and again, I watched the parents take their massive bills, which are shaped like giant pairs of tweezers, pluck tiny water striders off the surface, and feed them daintily to their only heir apparent.

A vital part of observing loons is making sure you don’t disturb them. I visit them on a favorite small lake, one with considerable canoe and kayak traffic, the traffic assuring me that the birds are well accustomed to boats. When I approach, I do so very, very slowly, avoiding eye contact. On land, wildlife photographers use a ruse called the “lost wallet trick,” whereby you look down and everywhere but directly at the animal you’re aiming to approach. It works well most of the time. I find that on water, it works nicely, too.

Should you cross an invisible boundary and enter the discomfort zone of loons, they let you know it by ceasing to go about normal activities such as feeding, and by uttering sounds, generally loud yodels, that tell you it’s time to go away. Loons feeling intense stress make sounds like demented laughter. Hear this, and unless an eagle or gull is passing overhead looking for loon chicks to eat, it’s time for you to back off.

6. FIVE VULTURES AND A FALCON

Cresting the top of a rocky hill, I burst out of shady woods into bright sunshine and was astonished to see a big falcon with sideburns rocketing over my head, not quite close enough to comb my hair with its talons. The bird was a peregrine falcon.

Close to extinction a few decades ago, peregrines have been brought back from the brink by government intervention, a Cornell University recovery program, the wise expenditure of tax dollars, and plenty of shrewdness and elbow grease on the part of biologists and their helpers. Peregrines are still somewhat rare. Blundering into this one, or having it nearly blunder into my family and me, was a thrill, and excitement was still to come.

Most of the peregrine falcon sightings I’ve had over the course of forty years of birdwatching have been fleeting. Often the birds have been little more than specks in a distant sky, specks that quickly disappeared. I’ve also seen a few on barrier island beaches, zooming past in pursuit of the next kill. But this peregrine remained close to us for half an hour, and it put on a show.

Peregrine falcons often hunt by climbing high into the sky, and when they spy a bird below them that might make good eating, they tuck their wings into diving position and plummet. Estimates of the speed of diving peregrines vary, but the number 242 miles per hour is often quoted. Imagine being a smaller bird and having a bigger, heavier raptor slam into your back at that velocity. It might be enough to break your spine.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Our peregrine caught an updraft off the little mountain we’d just climbed and rode it like an elevator heading for a higher floor. As the bird appeared to grow smaller with increasing altitude, we noticed a group of turkey vultures, five altogether, catching an updraft off a hill in the distance. I wondered: would the peregrine try to catch one of the vultures?

It did try. Angling its wings for a dive and pointing downward, it began to fall like a stone, directly toward one of the vultures. The distance between the two birds diminished in almost no time until the peregrine seemed poised to strike. Just then, the vulture tilted its wings and slipped deftly sideways. Defeated, the peregrine pulled out of its dive and swept around in a broad circle.

Again, the attack aircraft caught an updraft deflected by the hill that we were standing on, and it zoomed skyward. It cruised over the vultures, took apparent aim, and plummeted. We watched the blue-gray speck grow rapidly larger as it accelerated, faster and faster. Once more, just as an impact between falcon and vulture seemed imminent, the chosen target made a subtle horizontal movement. Once more, the predator was denied its prize.

Famed among bird watchers for its high-speed attack dives, the falcon had been outmaneuvered, twice, by a bird rarely celebrated for much of anything. I was impressed enormously. The events of the past hour had shown that while a peregrine falcon can fly through the air like a speeding bullet, a humble turkey vulture can sometimes slip out of harm’s way with an agility no less impressive.

7. OUT ON A LIMB

Yesterday, on a quiet road through the woods, I was cruising home from the pharmacy with antibiotics for my Streptococcus-stricken wife when from the corner of an eye I spied something that made no sense. It was a bird. At least, I thought it was a bird. The trouble was, its size approximated that of an orangutan.

There was nothing for it but to check the rear-view mirror (I attract tailgaters), punch the brakes, and throw the car into reverse. A hundred feet back, I turned to look again through the windshield and found myself eye to eye with a bald eagle.

The great hulk of a thing was scarcely fifty feet away, perched on the limb of a dying paper birch. The limb was spindly, and this, combined with the eagle’s proximity to the ground and to my retinas, made it appear gigantic. The bird was like a full moon that, creeping just above the horizon and brushing the tops of trees, appears to be a great inflated version of itself at the zenith.

This was hardly my first sighting of a bald eagle. On dozens of occasions I’ve seen the bird soaring in the sky, swooping low over water for fish and ducks. I’ve seen it perched Micawberish in tall pines, waiting for something to turn up, and I’ve seen it hunched over a deer carcass on the surface of a frozen lake. I’ve seen it in its signature adult plumage, with white head and tail, and I’ve seen it in a variety of juvenile color forms, including the chocolate brown of bald eagles in their birth year. I’ve seen bald eagles playing, and I’ve seen them fighting. I’ve seen them migrating, and I’ve seen them snoozing. But until this day, I’d never seen a wild one that I could almost touch and pet.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

To my delight, the eagle stayed put. I had a chance to admire its details, from alabaster head to iron-hard-taloned toe, to take in every feather’s barb and barbule, to admire the sweeping curve of its lethal and luminous yellow bill, and most dramatically, to be drilled to my quivering marrow by its sharp predatory eyes. The irises glowed a paler yellow than the bill. Each was punctuated by a tiny mote of black in the center.

Gazing into those hungry eyes, I pondered what a different encounter this might have been if I’d been a good deal smaller or the eagle a good deal larger. The notion wasn’t entirely fanciful. Giant eagles, the world’s largest, prowled New Zealand’s skies until a mere 500 years ago, or thereabouts. Scientists suspect they fueled their forty-pound fuselages on a diet that included the occasional human. Birds, after all, are dinosaurs, or so a great many scientists assert. Jurassic Park’s notion of people coexisting with dinosaurs is not a conceit at all but a reality we live with every day.

The eagle quickly lost interest in the car and me and turned its attention toward the river which lay beyond the tree. There might be ducks there, or fish swimming close to the surface, or perhaps a drowned mammal or unfortunate fish, swirling downstream with the flotsam.

Forty-two years ago, when I first took up work as an interpretive naturalist, such a backyard eagle sighting would have been inconceivable. Pesticides had all but exterminated the bird from the East. Yet thanks to Rachel Carson, who sounded the warning cry about DDT, and thanks to all who answered her call, the bald eagle has returned to our skies, forests, and waters.

A wintering colony of eagles at Croton Point on the Hudson River, decimated by the 1960s and given up for lost, has been repopulated by birds descended, I suspect, largely from ones Pete Nye and his colleagues at New York State’s DEC took from nests in Alaska and released here. Today, thanks to the hard work and foresight of a great many people as well as the generosity of the taxpayer, we can rejoice in the bald eagle’s return, even as we acknowledge, in a world and in a time still fraught with perils, that they—and we—are not yet out of the woods.

8. GOLDEN PAST, UNCERTAIN FUTURE

In 1978, the year Bruce Beehler’s Birdlife of the Adirondack Park was published, two kinds of eagle could possibly be seen in the region in summer, the bald and the golden. The more rare of the two, then, was the bald, listed by Beehler as “possibly extirpated.” The pesticide DDT had taken this once abundant Adirondack bird and driven it to local extinction. Beehler expressed a belief that the golden eagle, named for a wash of gold on the bird’s head and nape, still nested in our mountains, perhaps on remote cliffs in the High Peaks.

The first documented golden eagle nest in New York was found by naturalist Greenleaf Chase in St. Lawrence County in 1957. The last documented breeding of the species in New York occurred in 1970 in Hamilton County. No proof of goldens nesting in the park or anywhere else in the state has been discovered since.

Today, bald eagles are a common sight. They appear in the Adirondacks throughout the year, raising young in giant stick nests, often built high in white pines. DDT, banned for decades, no longer causes bald eagles to lay eggs with fragile shells. Eggs tend to hatch, and eaglets reared here are apt to stay year-round or migrate away and return to breed. My wife, children, and I live along the Saranac River. We glimpse bald eagles moving up and down the river and floodplain every month of the year. The birds we see are hunting for fish, ducks, carrion, and whatever else they might grab, including, until we acquired a noisy goose to defend them, our free-range domesticated ducks. Many of the eagles we see lack the trademark white head. For the first three or four years of their lives, bald eagles are generally dark, with varying amounts of white mottling.

Meanwhile the golden eagle remains rare in the Adirondacks, or less than rare, except as a migrant passing overhead. In four years of surveying conducted as part of the 2000–2005 New York State Breeding Bird Atlas project, only two prospective golden eagle breeders in northern New York were reported to coordinator Kim Corwin. Neither of these birds was observed building a cliffside nest, incubating eggs, or tending young. Migrating goldens are seen regularly in Adirondack skies, especially in the fall. We’ve spied two flying over our place. But these goldens are likely migrants coming south from, or going back to, Quebec or Labrador.

Why are goldens so scarce? Peter Nye, at press time head of DEC’s Endangered Species Unit, credited the regrowth of eastern forests, the suppression of fires, and pesticides, which made the species rare not only in the Adirondacks, but throughout the East. He also pointed to the following grim statistics. Of the golden eagles found dead in New York and brought to the attention of DEC between 1930 and 1996, 44 percent were killed in traps and 16 percent were shot.

West of the Mississippi, the story is rosier. Golden eagles have their troubles, but they still abound. I’ve seen them in Texas, perched on fenceposts or soaring over the desert on massive wings. For the most part, this is a bird of open country. Its presence until recently in the Adirondacks and the East was likely a result of clear-cutting and forest fires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In 1980, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) investigated the feasibility of mounting an ambitious and expensive reintroduction of the golden eagle in the Adirondacks. Studies of old and recent aerial photographs showed that clearings had given way to forest around four out of five historical breeding sites. This didn’t mean that goldens couldn’t still nest here, but it did suggest that the habitat trend was less than promising. The idea was dropped.

How to know a golden eagle if you see one? Look for a massive, dark bird with an almost seven-foot wingspan. If the bird you see is a bald eagle, the wings will tend to lie in the same plane while the bird soars. A golden’s wings tend to form a slight dihedral, or “Y,” not quite as pronounced as the dihedral of the now abundant turkey vulture. You probably won’t see the gold on the bird’s head and nape, so instead look for subtle features. A first-year bald eagle has white patches at the base of its wings, while a first-year golden has bold, sharply defined patches of white near the wingtips. Golden eagles in all plumages have a broad black band at the end of their tails, balds a narrow band. Second- and third-year eagles can be tricky. Generally, goldens are darker and more uniform and less likely to appear scruffy. Adult eagles are easy to distinguish. Balds have brilliant white heads and tails. Goldens look like they’ve been to the beauty parlor for blond hair highlights, and their tails are dark and end in a wide black band.

If it’s late spring or summer, and you make careful observations and determine that you really have seen a golden eagle, not a turkey vulture or a young bald eagle, report it to the DEC. Be sure to keep your distance. If the birds have a cliff nest, you could scare them off or leave a scent trail that might lead a raccoon or fox straight to the eggs.

9. WALKING LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

The term, if I’m not mistaken, is paratactic rendering. It refers to that particular style of art, practiced with gusto by the ancient Egyptians, of depicting humans as if they’ve been surprised by a steamroller. Upper bodies appear flattened full-frontal, while lower halves show hips, legs, and feet in profile. The painters of King Tut’s time couldn’t decide whether to give us their subjects head-on or sideways. So they split the difference.

What does all this have to do with that ungainly yet handsome bird, a sandpiper gone sylvan, known as the American woodcock? Read on.

A few nights ago, I was motoring up the driveway with a gallon of milk keeping me company on the passenger seat when a bird stepped out and blocked the way. It was a woodcock: no doubt about that. The body was plump and round like a grapefruit, the eyes were dark and not quite round, the bill half as long as the rest of the bird and poker-shaped.

What on earth was it up to? I’d surprised dozens of woodcock over the course of the previous couple of months, and every one had exploded from the ground and flown at the first threat of disruption of its solitude.

This one did not fly. Instead it stepped purposefully in front of the car. I had two choices. I could flatten it, or I could stop.

Of course, bird lover that I am, I stopped. Here I grasped what the woodcock was up to. (What, mind you, not why.) It was walking like an Egyptian, which is to say, proceeding in a strange, jerky, twisted fashion. I’d seen a woodcock behave this way once before, years ago in Pennsylvania. As then, I was baffled.

Readers of a certain age will remember the days when King Tut’s sarcophagus and burial paraphernalia toured the land, and the comedian Steve Martin celebrated the historic event on the television program Saturday Night Live with song and dance. “Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia, King Tut!” sang Martin. Meanwhile he aped those paratactic ancient Egyptian paintings.

All this came back to me while I ogled the bird in the driveway. Step by bobbing step, it jerked from left to right. Was it a female heavy with eggs? Did it have gas? I really had no clue.

If I was a PhD candidate, I’d have snatched up that woodcock, taken its cloacal temperature, weighed it, measured it, snipped a bit of feather for chemical analysis, drawn blood for DNA, and run the stunned creature through an X-ray machine. In this way I might have formed an idea why the bird was behaving the way it was.

I would have ruined the woodcock’s day, but I’d have learned something. As it was, I was left to wonder. The bird finished its slow journey to the far side, and I was able to drive past it.

Before hurrying the milk inside to appease thirsty dependents, I slipped back for a look. The woodcock had advanced a few more feet and was now hunkered down in a photogenic patch of brush. I darted away for a camera. When I tiptoed back, the bird did what a woodcock usually does when you go near. It blasted off hastily as if bound for the moon.

10. CHALLENGE AT DAWN

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The first morning, the sound penetrated the outer reaches of consciousness. Glug-glug-glug . . . glug-glug-glug. Half awake, as the morning chatter of birds trickling into the screened porch where I was sleeping, I heard the notes, full and round.

I heard them, yet I didn’t hear them. After all, I was at least half asleep.

The second morning, the voice came again. Exactly as it had the preceding day, it spoke from afar, from across the lawn, from the far side of the road, from deep in a thicket. Glug-glug-glug . . . glug-glug-glug.

This time, a middle layer of consciousness was reached. I thought to myself, in the way that one grapples with things when half alert and half sleeping, that this was a new sound, a sound I had not heard in a long, long time, and I should leap out of bed and pay close attention. But I did not leap out of bed. I did not open my eyes. I listened, absorbed the notes without thinking, and drifted back into the arms of slumber as one might succumb to anesthesia.

The third morning, long before the alarm clock rang, it came again. Glug-glug-glug . . . glug-glug-glug. This time, at long last, the mind reacted. I woke up, hauled myself upright, and listened closely.

Glug-glug-glug . . . glug-glug-glug. The song, surely, came from a bird. But which bird? Summer was growing old. The days of new birds arriving were past. Which, I wondered, of the usual suspects was speaking?

I scanned the gray coils of memory and reached a conclusion: despite the lateness of the season, this was, in fact, a new bird after all, some late-arriving wanderer. But which one? I wiped the sleep from my eyes and pondered.

Glug-glug-glug . . . glug-glug-glug. The bird kept calling. I was lucky on that score. This was no hit-and-run sort of vocalizer. It stayed in one place and sang over and over and over until the repetition grew maddening.

Suddenly the answer I’d been straining for bobbed up out of a dark pool. Of course! Of course! Three mornings in a row, I’d been awakened by a black-billed cuckoo, a bird I’d not seen or heard in at least a dozen years.

That’s how it goes with our northeastern cuckoos, the black-billed and the yellow-billed. You may go years without hearing one, and suddenly, they spew out their guttural, gulping songs and won’t let you sleep.

If I remember correctly, the last time I set eyes on a black-billed cuckoo was in the 1980s. A full-blown gypsy moth infestation was underway, and cuckoos had appeared in great number to feast on the larvae.

Most birds eat few if any hairy caterpillars because the “hairs” are actually spines laced with chemical irritants. But the cuckoo has evolved a neat trick for circumventing the problem. It gorges on the caterpillars, apparently immune or insensitive to their nettlesome secretions, then, when the spines accumulate in great number, the cuckoo coughs up a disposable stomach lining. Out go the prickers, and the cuckoo swoops in for another meal.

This year I’ve noticed more than the usual abundance of eastern tent caterpillars and forest tent caterpillars in our woods. I suspect the black-billed cuckoo that sings to me in the morning has noticed the abundance, too, and that’s why it’s here. Now it’s seeing if it can capitalize on the discovery. It’s singing for a mate.

If the bird wakes me tomorrow morning, perhaps I’ll pull on a pair of shoes and see if I can find it. The black-billed cuckoo is an elegant bird, sleek of torso and long of tail, with red lines circling the eyes. The red lines give the bird a bloodshot and dissipated look, as if it has squandered its good looks and talents on too many romantic adventures in thickets. All the same, I’d be glad to catch a glimpse.

11. COLD BIRDS STAY WARM, OR TRY TO

One night during a recent winter the temperature was about 8 degrees Fahrenheit when I looked out the kitchen window and saw a barred owl. It was the bird my kids called “Hoots.” Hoots had become a regular visitor to a platform-style bird feeder on which we put out a chicken carcass each week. Hoots was here to dine.

I wondered if Hoots may actually have been two birds. Some nights, the owl looked small, suggesting it was a male. But on this particular night, Hoots appeared huge. With birds of prey, as with frogs and toads, the big, powerful individuals we marvel at are the girls. The boys by comparison are puny and weak.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

That said, I thought it likely Hoots was Hoots and no one else. The difference in size from one visit to the next quite possibly had nothing to do with gender or individual variation and everything to do with temperature and wind. If we want a down sleeping bag to keep us warm on a cold-weather camping trip, we shake the bag and fluff the feathers before we crawl into it. Live birds do much the same thing. The colder it gets, the more they twitch muscles in their skin to lift up feathers, increasing loft and R-value. Human goosebumps represent our own feeble attempts to do a similar thing. Unfortunately, unless you’re a virtual gorilla, you have too little hair to gain warmth from the effort.

Another thing Hoots did to stay warm was spend as many hours of the day and night as possible in thick cover. It’s a stratagem widely used among birds. The less they’re exposed to cold and wind, the fewer calories of stored energy they have to burn, and the more likely they are to survive until the following morning, the following week, and the coming of spring.

The temperature under the enfolding arms of evergreen boughs, especially if one snuggles up to the thermal mass of a tree’s trunk, can be several degrees warmer than the outside air. For Hoots and other birds trying to stay alive without the benefit of central heating or a woodstove, those several degrees may spell the difference between life and death. Hoots always seemed to materialize out of evergreens, and at the end of a visit it was into them that she, or he, always disappeared.

Perhaps the most astounding thing about winter birds is how they keep their naked feet warm. Of course, not all of them actually have naked feet, a trait the snowy owl, an Arctic bird that appears to wear down booties, takes to the extreme. Most birds have scantily feathered feet, or feet with no feathers at all. How can they stand it?

How can they endure?

One thing birds do is restrict blood flow to their feet, rendering their landing gear little more than mechanical devices operated by muscles and tendons anchored in warm places higher up on the body. It’s a neat trick, but there’s a downside. Sensation is reduced, although given how unhappy my fingers feel when they get badly chilled, maybe this isn’t a bad thing.

Birds can generally stand and balance on one foot at a time. This allows for another trick of winter survival and comfort: pulling one naked foot up under warm feathers while the other one does its work, and then switching feet now and again.

All in all, winter can still be lethal for birds. Many starve and freeze to death, with only a fraction of a year’s young birds enduring to see the snow melt and to welcome the return of flowers, fruits, bugs, and hordes of mice and voles. Birds suffer frostbite, too. Mourning doves, for example, are not especially well winterized and lose toes and sometimes entire feet to freezing.

How Hoots fared the remainder of that winter I cannot say. At some point in March we realized we hadn’t seen Hoots in weeks, and we never saw her or him again.

12. TOOTING IN THE NIGHT

The notes are clear and ringing. Toot, toot, toot, toot, says a small sonorous voice, punctuating the blank page of the crisp night air. The notes come at precise intervals, as if a metronome is keeping time.

The sounds might bring on a sense of monotony if it weren’t for the sweet fullness of the tones. This is the night music of the Northeast’s smallest owl, the saw-whet. Every year as winter yields to spring, one of these birds, hardly larger than a man’s fist, comes to sing in the spruce and fir woods behind my writing studio.

Various theories have been proposed to account for the peculiar name of the owl. Most sources say that the name arises from a sound the saw-whet makes, one suggestive of the noise produced when a saw is sharpened on a whetstone. This sounds reasonable if you don’t think about it much. The problem is, a knife or woodworker’s chisel is sharpened on a whetstone, but the teeth of a saw must be sharpened with a file. A file abrading saw-teeth produces sounds unlike anything I’ve ever heard from an owl, saw-whet or otherwise.

The most likely theory, for my money, is one I first heard from my late ornithologist friend Julio de la Torre, author of the excellent Owls: Their Life and Behavior, illustrated with stunning photos by Art Wolfe. Julio explained (and I’ve since confirmed) that in French, a small owl is called a souette. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine English speakers mangling souette until the word came out “saw-whet.” Throw in lumberjacks felling trees with crosscut saws, and it’s easy to imagine how the saw-whet owl likely acquired both its name and the confusion that surrounds it.

In addition to uttering high, piping notes rather than low, foghorn-like hoots, the saw-whet stands out from other northeastern owls by reason of its size. Even the tiny screech owl, another non-hooter, is larger, if only slightly. But a screech owl standing eight and a half inches tall looks significantly grander than a saw-whet standing eight. The screech has tufts suggesting horns on top of its head, while the saw-whet’s head is rounded.

When you get close to a saw-whet owl, which if you find one can be easy to do, you may find it hard to imagine anything so small being an effective predator. Yet it is a skilled and lethal killer. The first saw-whet I ever got close to in the wild was sitting in a holly tree on Greenwich Point, in Connecticut. It clasped a decapitated mouse in one set of its talons. On the ground beneath it, the remains of numerous other rodents were strewn.

The tameness of saw-whets is legendary. My late friend Kaye Anderson, who was a mentor to me in my early years as a naturalist, told me she’d heard stories of bird banders walking up to wild saw-whets, plucking them off their perches, banding them, putting them back, and having the birds continue doing whatever it was they were doing before being rudely interrupted. Kaye, a bander herself, had a chance to put the story to the test. A woman on the phone reported a tiny owl in her back yard. Kaye paid a visit, eased up to the saw-whet, banded it, and placed it gently back on the same spot on the same limb, where it remained.

Of course, this is not to be tried by the rest of us, for the owl could be injured. Also worth considering, the saw-whet’s talons, however dainty, are needle-sharp and can inflict serious damage on human flesh.

The saw-whets we hear at our place may be nesting. We’ve never caught them in the act, and so we don’t really know. Last year, as part of a homeschool class in high school biology, my daughter Tasman and I advanced the cause by building them a birdhouse custom tailored for saw-whet owls. Now we wait and watch and listen.

13. SPRING OWLS

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

It’s not easy being an owl. You’ve got to find a quiet place to sleep during the day where crows and smaller songbirds won’t taunt and harass you, and where fellow predators such as hawks will leave you alone. Then, if you’re a typical night-hunting owl, you’ve got to venture out in the dark and not crash into things while trying to see and hear smaller creatures hopping, scurrying, crawling, and flapping. You have hollow brittle bones that can snap on impact, yet you’ve got to pounce hard and often inflict fatal or grievous injuries before your prey defends itself, possibly with teeth. All these are daunting challenges. Yet the greatest challenge of all for an owl in our part of the world is simply staying alive in winter so it can live to see the spring. We in the Adirondacks sometimes joke that we have two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July.

The adult owl you spy in spring is a hero, a victor over tough odds. To maintain a body temperature in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and to keep strong and spry enough to find and capture prey without getting hurt, the owl had to do a lot of eating in order to reach May.

What’s more, owls generally breed in late winter or early spring. The timing makes sense when you think about it. Owls want their eggs hatched and their young out of the nest learning to hunt at a time when other creatures are flooding the woods and fields with their own inexpert offspring. It’s important for owls to get a jump on the neighbors.

Breeding requires a delicate negotiation between the female owl and the male. The females are bigger and stronger, and they’re born killers. A smaller, weaker male has to know what he’s doing before he initiates a close approach. This tends to occur after a period of courtship involving considerable conversation and the keeping of company. An endearing thing about owls, from a human perspective, is that, something like we do, they talk to each other. If we listen, we hear them hooting, tooting, whinnying, or whatever each particular kind of owl does to communicate. Songbirds, by contrast and with exceptions, tend to leave the lion’s share of sound-making to the males.

For owls to converse, and to move around in each other’s orbits, they have to eat all the more. Relationships require energy and hard work. And so the pressure is on to feast, and to do so at a time of year when famine is more the rule than the exception.

In late winter and early spring, owls sometimes turn up in open places where we come and go. Normally the shy night hunters would be too cautious to show themselves, except after dark. However, when pressed by hunger, they take chances they might not risk otherwise.

An underfed owl in the open makes a great photographic subject and offers exciting opportunities for observation. But it’s important with such an individual to be mindful of the well-being of the bird. The owl is under great stress. Enjoy it at a reasonable distance and resist the chance to chase it from perch to perch through the woods.

I recently took one step closer to a barred owl than I should have, and I’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since. The bird had turned up in the backyard of friends and neighbors. I approached in roundabout fashion, avoiding eye contact. But I failed to stop when, with the owl’s best interests in mind, I should have stopped. I heard a whoosh, and out of the corner of an eye saw the bird gliding away.

Today, that owl is probably sitting in the same or a nearby tree. I vow not to make the same mistake twice. I will stay away and give the bird a better chance of living to hoot on the Fourth of July.

14. NOW YOU SEE ’EM, NOW YOU DON’T

There are events on nature’s calendar I look forward to, and others, such as the September departure of hummingbirds, that I dread.

In summer, we live amid a clamor of ruby-throated hummingbirds that buzz around our nucleus of feeders like electrons. This year, we had so many hummers hanging around that at times it seemed dangerous to step out the door. Wearing red was downright foolish. Hummingbirds seek the color with the zeal of heat-seeking missiles chasing airplane engines. After a terrifying venture out the door wearing a red baseball cap, I knew never to commit that error again.

“Live in the moment” tops the list of gratuitous advice I hear these days. How can one follow it when there’s next month’s mortgage payment to round up, and last month’s good fortune to be savored? I find it impossible to live in the moment and remain a feeling, thinking human being, especially where hummingbirds are concerned.

All winter long, on and off, I think of hummingbirds: how much they’re probably enjoying their winter sojourns on the Yucatán, how long it’ll be before they blast overhead and again part my hair with their contrails.

In spring I rejoice at their return. They turn up at our house each year on or around the 7th of May. Hummers epitomize the phrase “creatures of habit.” A husband-and-wife team of bird banders in Alabama, the Sargents, once explained to Debbie and me that hummers often returned each year to their place not only on the same day, but during the same hour. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” I wonder if the little minds he was thinking of belonged to hummingbirds.

It strikes me as peculiar that the largest motor vehicle in America and the smallest bird should both carry the same nickname.

All summer long, I strive to live in the moment as advice-givers tell me to. Yet somehow, I manage again and again to dwell on the not-so-imminent, imminent, and eventually painfully imminent leave-taking of our hot-blooded, nectar-swilling hummingbirds. Birds come and birds go, but somehow no other bird makes its exit with such stark finality.

At our house, it happens like this. There’s a day in late August or early September when the air traffic controller’s summer nightmare finally ends. The hummingbird feeders are eerily quiet, although a few visitors come and go. I find myself feeling glum. But not to worry. The following morning, all again is madness. One can indulge a bit of pleasant denial until the next quiet morning leads to the next and the next.

In the North, at least at our place, hummer numbers taper decisively in early September, and the season ends incrementally. When we lived in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, working for Gulf Islands National Seashore and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, the picture was dramatically different. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, which don’t like to fly over wide stretches of water, gathered in our live oaks and wisteria in stupendous number. There they remained, day after day, in a holding pattern, until a morning when a cold front passed through. Then, like the air rushing out of a popped balloon, the buzzing hordes would vanish at once, all riding the wave of cool New England air straight across the Gulf to Campeche and Cozumel.

On the day I write these words, I don’t see a single hummingbird. No need to send me a sympathy card, although I won’t get over the loss until the leaves start blazing, and even then, not completely. Only next May, when hummers once more hover beside the kitchen window and stage aerial dogfights over our roof, will I fully embrace the moment I’m living in.

15. BEAUTY OF THE HUMBLE FLICKER

I look up from the dishes I’m washing and through the kitchen window spy a plump, robin-sized bird hopping a few feet away. The sight of it takes my breath away. No exaggeration: I’m so gobsmacked my thorax feels momentarily paralyzed. Cardinals and tanagers wear bolder colors and grouse are more elaborately marked, but for sheer elegance, no bird tops the one before me: our humble, ant-eating, wildly abundant woodpecker of the warm months, the northern flicker.

The flicker is a woodpecker largely by pedigree. Fact is, this bird doesn’t seem to care much for following the family profession. They’re still capable of pecking wood, mind you, and they chisel out hollows in trees at nesting time. But one way or another, during the meandering course of their evolutionary history, flickers decided that hammering their heads against hardwood is too much of a headache, and they set off in other directions.

Instead they subsist to a large degree by spiriting ants out of anthills. The flicker is the only North American bird that eats so many of them. Ants occur in staggering number, and partly as a result, the flicker is our most abundant and widespread “woodpecker” in summertime.

How the bird gets away with eating so many ants, which produce irritating formic acid when they’re put upon, is something of a mystery. One line of thinking says that the sticky saliva that coats the flicker’s tongue and helps it lap ants out of anthills has a high pH, and the alkalinity neutralizes the bitter stuff.

The flicker is not the only ant-eating specialist among North American woodpeckers. The pileated woodpecker, nearly the size of a crow and named for the flaming red crest, or pileus, that adorns the top of its head, dines to an almost obsessive degree on carpenter ants, a species the flicker largely leaves alone.

Carpenter ants chisel out the dark, moist insides of tree trunks and turn them into high-rise apartment complexes, albeit ones without windows. Pileateds hear the ants routing inside and without permission from the ants or local code enforcement officers blast holes straight through the walls. In darts the pileated woodpecker’s long tongue. Out, as if on a conveyor belt, come big black juicy ants by the hundred.

Which of our ant eaters stays with us through the winter? The answer, if you think about it, is obvious. Tree trunks remain readily accessible through the cold months, with ants holed up inside them ripe for the picking. Anyone who splits firewood in January knows the sight of dopey, rudely awakened ants spilling out black and twitching on the snow. Why migrate? Pileated woodpeckers stay with us and drill.

To flickers, the calendar is much less kind. When cold weather comes, ants of the sort they gorge on retreat deep into the soil. Sticky tongues can’t reach them. In fact, sticky tongues can’t even find and reach the holes, which through most of the winter lie buried under inches or feet of snow. So the flicker does the sensible thing. It leaves us and migrates to the South.

Very likely, this is what the flicker is doing outside our kitchen window. We’ve been awash in these myrmecophagous woodpeckers for a week as they push toward wintering grounds in Dixie and the Caribbean. Migrants are easy to spot. Look for robust, faintly golden birds hopping along roadsides, ones that fly up at your approach and in so doing flash bold white patches on their rumps.

Only up close does the flicker reveal its stunning beauty. The crown is a rich silver gray, the cheeks a handsome beige, the belly cream-colored and speckled with black, the back bronze and nattily barred. Males sport black mustaches (red in the West), and both sexes wear a black chevron across the upper breast. The white rump remains generally hidden while the bird is at rest. As the one I’m watching takes flight, gold-shafted flight feathers glint in the sunshine.

16. PECKERS IN THE WOODS

Whether you call these birds woodpeckers, as I do, or peckerwoods, as some of my neighbors did when I worked as a park ranger at Gulf Islands National Seashore’s Mississippi District in the 1990s, they peck wood for their livings, each species in a distinctive way. There’s the yellow-bellied sapsucker, for example, that drills rows of holes into tree trunks, holes that ooze sap and attract bugs, awaiting the sapsucker’s return. And there’s the black-backed woodpecker I see in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York that pecks ever so lightly on the bark of dead and dying conifers. Flakes fly, and insects are revealed. And there’s the biggest, boldest, jazziest extant North American woodpecker of them all, the pileated.

Let’s get pronunciation out of the way. I say pileated with a long “i” for two reasons. The English phonetics I was taught by my first grade teacher, Desdemona Peer, argue for a long vowel with a single consonant following. If it was “pilleated,” the vowel would be short. Second, the bird, sporting electric scarlet on top of its head, derives its name from a hat, a “pileus,” defined by my battered copy of Webster’s Collegiate as “a pointed or close-fitting cap worn by ancient Romans.” The dictionary indicates that pileus is pronounced with a long “i.”

But no matter. If you know the bird and have been saying PILL-ee-ate-id all your life, I think you can be confident the bird doesn’t care. Nor do I care. Nobody cares, really. If there is someone who cares, that person lies beyond your perimeter of rational concern. (All right. I admit I do care, a little, but not much.)

The astonishing thing about the pileated woodpecker, aside from its blazing crest and the subtle but handsome red mustache stripes of the male, is its size. To employ a word not included in my vintage Webster’s, it’s humongous. Why be so much bigger than your fellow woodpeckers? Evolution’s answer seems plain. The pileated drills deep into stout tree trunks to pluck out carpenter ants. To do that requires a big muscular bird with a long sturdy beak, strong neck, and a very long lingua. Our other woodpeckers are simply not up to the job.

Pileated woodpeckers don’t feed exclusively on carpenter ants. They eat other insects, too, as well as assorted nuts and fruits. At our house, where chokecherry trees produce masses of ruby-red, mouth-puckering fruits every summer, we watch pileateds break from ant-eating and join the local cedar waxwings in gorging on cherries.

I’m not sure how pileated woodpeckers decide which trees are worth chiseling, and I’m not sure ornithologists are sure about this, either. In years of observing the birds informally, I’ve noted that when one lands on a tree with no prior excavations in it, it often raps its bill sharply a time or two. Perhaps this is like thumping a watermelon at the market. A hollow sound indicates a ripe watermelon, and presumably it tells of a tree cored by insects. The hollower-in-chief of trunks in our woods is the carpenter ant.

Watching pileated woodpeckers hack into live trees, which they often do, it’s impossible not to wonder whether they’re doing harm or good. The rotten heartwood of an affected trunk, softened by the digestive enzymes of fungi and rasped out and discarded by ants making nests, puts the future of the tree at grave risk before the surgeon arrives in the operating theater. I am pleased to report, in the bird’s defense, that I have seen a great many softwoods over the years, hemlocks and spruces, that have recovered from the woodpecker’s attentions. New bark and wood come to cover over the gaping hole, and the tree, unless it snaps off in a gale in the meantime, flourishes anew. In this health care transaction, the bill comes first. Payment is accepted shortly thereafter in ants.

17. A TALE OF TWO WOODPECKERS

At a glance, they’re twins, except for the size difference. The downy woodpecker, the smaller, is black and white all over, except for the fact that the male wears a daub of red on his nape. The hairy woodpecker, the larger, has all the same markings, right down to the red nape of the male. Still, if you get a good look, identifying a particular woodpecker as a downy or a hairy isn’t all that difficult.

First, consider the habitat. There’s a lot of overlap between these two, but generally, if you’re among conifers or in a mixed conifer-hardwood stand, you’ll probably see more hairies than downies. And if you’re in a hardwood forest (one composed of maples, beeches, birches, and various relations, rather than conifers), you’ll generally find more downies.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

In the places where a great many of us watch birds, both the downy and the hairy number among the usual suspects. So you’ve got to look for field marks.

The most conspicuous difference between the two birds has to do with the length of the bill relative to the size of the head. If the bill is distinctly shorter than the head is wide, you’re looking at a downy. If the length of the bill is a match or near match for the width of the head, you’re ogling a hairy. But even this can get tricky. In brutally cold winter weather, the birds fluff up their feathers to keep themselves warmer. This can make a hairy woodpecker’s head look so large the bill appears small.

When all else fails and you’re still stumped by a black-and-white woodpecker, take a look at the outermost feather on each side of the tail. On both the downy and the hairy, they’re white. Yet there’s a subtle difference. Small black spots dot the lower reaches of the downy’s outer tail feathers. You won’t find these spots on the outer white tail feathers of a hairy.

Sounds offer further clues. Downy woodpeckers often utter a trademark series of thin, dry notes that descend sharply, like a horse’s whinny. The most common utterance of the hairy woodpecker is an abrupt, loud piping note that might be written peek! Hairies make something like a whinny, too, but theirs tends to hold its pitch rather than drop like a horse’s. Both woodpeckers drum to keep in touch with mates. If there’s an easy way to differentiate the drumming of one from the other, I don’t know it.

You would think two woodpeckers that are so nearly identical, size differences aside, would be closely related. But genetic studies suggest they are distant cousins. Perhaps the adaptive qualities of the markings of one apply equally well to the other.

Downy and hairy woodpeckers may coexist in forests because they feed in different niches. Downies tend to forage along watercourses in shrubs and small trees. They glean insects from the surface of bark and tend to penetrate tree epidermis only barely. Hairy woodpeckers exfoliate large tree trunks in search of insects, and they also peck holes that penetrate beyond the outer and inner bark to a tree’s cambium layer and sapwood. Walking in the woods, you may hear a very faint tapping and find it to be a downy. If the tapping is quite loud, the bird you find at the source of it may well be a hairy—unless the pecking sounds like a carpenter wielding hammer and chisel, but then, that’s another woodpecker for another day.

18. PEREGRINATIONS

The bird, a raptor of some kind, was big—not quite the size of a Cessna or eagle, but far bigger than the broad-winged hawks we see nearly every day in summer. Gliding through the umbra of its own shade, it looked black, even though the sun was bright. I was struck by my own uncertainty. After years of practice, I usually know raptors at a glance. Yet this one wasn’t ringing a bell.

In not much longer than it takes to blink an eye, the bird closed the hundred yards or so between us. Now it was almost directly overhead, pumping its wings, the strokes deep and muscular, conveying an impression of great power. The raptor shot left to right, skimming the tops of the trees. From the senior outing group I was leading came gasps of surprise and delight. Then the bird was gone. Someone said, “What was that?”

With the apparition overhead, I had seen that its wings ended not broadly, as hawk wings do, but in points. I had also gauged the bird’s size. It was, as I’d first thought, enormous, similar in mass and wingspan to a red-tailed hawk. A bold black stripe ran down each side of the head, and the throat was snow-white. This was a peregrine falcon.

According to a dictionary of Latin that lives near my desk, Peregrinus, the root of peregrine, is Latin for foreign, strange, alien, and exotic. The peregrine falcon seems to be all these things. So much bigger and faster than all other North American falcons except the gyrfalcon, it appears a stranger on its own breeding grounds and along its migratory flight paths. Every time I see one, and it’s not often, I’m astonished how powerful the bird looks, how it slices up the air with scissorlike wings, and how, when it dives, it plummets at ever-accelerating speed until my eyes can’t keep up.

While the peregrine manages to look out of place wherever you find it, it’s at home just about everywhere. The bird is native to North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia—in other words, to every continent except the one that’s perpetually frozen.

In the eastern United States during the mid-twentieth century, the peregrine fell prey to pesticides such as DDT. It was gone this side of the Mississippi by the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Happily, and contrary to the often-heard claim that government agencies can do no good, a cooperative effort between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, various state conservation agencies and universities, and the not-for-profit Peregrine Fund succeeded in restoring the falcons to some of their old eastern haunts.

And so, peregrines carry on. They continue to hunt other birds on the wing, and as years pass, they continue to reclaim more and more of their former range. Chances for seeing them increase every year. During the breeding season in spring and early summer, the big falcons nest mainly on ledges high on cliffs or, more recently, on buildings and bridges. The rest of the year, they peregrinate here and there, often flying south, or to the coast, or both in search of milder weather and better hunting. This is when most of us see them, coming or going, rising and falling, traveling confidently and gracefully on the wing.

19. UBIQUITOUS VIREOS OF SUMMER

Most people have never heard of a vireo, let alone set eyes on one in its camouflaged cloak of feathers. These are birds, summer birds, that come to us from such faraway places as Central America and the jungles of the Amazon. They court, mate, raise a quick batch of young if they can, and then wing straight back to where they came from.

Vireos are masters of disappearance, which allows them to fly under the radar of everyone who’s not a devoted bird watcher. Our most common, the red-eyed vireo, has a green back that effectively vanishes amidst the verdure of the woods it inhabits. Underneath, the bird is white. If a vireo sings loudly right above you, and you look up to catch a glimpse, its pale belly blends in with the bright spaces between leaves. There may be no bird harder to see.

Not only are red-eyed vireos challenging for us to spot, they’re surely difficult for other red-eyed vireos to spot, too. I suspect this explains why the males sing incessantly. If they weren’t so noisy, they’d surely have a hard time finding mates and driving off rivals. Female red-eyed vireos make sounds, too, especially a nasal meow also made by males.

Although I’ve never been half as talented as some of my friends when it comes to learning to recognize birds by their voices, I’ve made respectable progress. One helping hand came at Big Bend National Park in Texas in 1982. My naturalist friend Bill Perron and I were on a bird walk led by Anne Bellamy. Ranger Bellamy was warm and knew her stuff, and I learned much that day from her. The most valuable lesson concerned vireos. Ranger Bellamy said, “They’re the question and answer birds. When a male sings, it seems to ask a rhetorical question, then answer it.” That description hits the nail pretty much on the head. Over and over, often all day long, a male red-eyed vireo seems to say: “Who am I? Vireo. Who are you? I don’t know.”

That’s the typical (but not the only) vireo song pattern. Yet there are as many variations as there are species of vireos. In the Northeast, we also have the blue-headed vireo, which favors coniferous or mixed coniferous-deciduous forest, as opposed to the red-eyed, which tends to be among oaks, maples, or other trees that shed their broad leaves in autumn. The blue-headed vireo asks and answers its own questions, too. But the notes have a more ringing quality than those broadcast by its cousin, and the phrases are most often two-noted, rather than coming in groups of three. The blue-headed’s pauses between phrases tend to be longer, too.

Three other vireos widespread in the Northeast are the yellow-throated, the warbling, and the white-eyed. The yellow-throated sounds a fair bit like a blue-headed, but the voice is usually hoarse. Just as a scarlet tanager sounds like a gravelly-voiced robin, a yellow-throated vireo sounds like a blue-headed vireo that has sung too much and worn its voice ragged.

As for the warbling vireo and the white-eyed, they break the pattern. The warbling sings a breathless, rapid-fire, roller coaster of a song that my naturalist friend Kurt Weiskotten renders “If you catch it, will you squeeze it, if you squeeze it, will it squirt?” The white-eyed vireo starts with a loud chip, warbles a little, then wraps up with a second chip.

Because vireos feed heavily on inchworms and other forest insects and hardly ever come near bird feeders, the chances of seeing one from your kitchen window are slim. You’ve got to get out and into the woods. Listen and look. If it’s summer and vireos are in the neighborhood, there’s an excellent chance you’ll hear them engaging in conversations with themselves.

20. NUTHATCHES IN WINTER

One is called “white-breasted,” the other “red-breasted.” Only the first lives up to its name. They are birds, the only two nuthatches native to the forests of northeastern North America.

Of the two, the white-breasted is larger. It measures not quite six inches from stem to stern. This is a handsome bird, not colorful but boldly patterned. The back is blue-gray, the breast white as advertised, and the cap and nape either black, if you’re looking at a male, or gray, if the nuthatch is a female.

As for the beak, it’s pointed, straight, slender but not delicate, and on the whole built like a pair of tweezers. The resemblance to tweezers is no coincidence. Evolution equipped the white-breasted nuthatch to grasp small things, such as insects and their eggs, larvae, and pupae, and pluck them out of the places in which they’re embedded.

The name “nuthatch” suggests a diet that includes more than just bugs. This is indeed the case. The white-breasted nuthatch and its close cousin the red-breasted both have the distinctive habit of picking up seeds, flying to a favorite tree trunk, wedging the seeds in crevices in the bark, and then “hatching” them with persistent pointed pecking.

An Australian bird, the varied sitella, looks uncannily like our white-breasted nuthatch, even though the two birds are not closely related. They both have the habit (shared with our red-breasted nuthatch) of beginning near the tops of trees and walking down the trunks, looking for things to eat. Evolutionary pressures acting in similar niches gave rise to similar shapes, colors, and behavior.

While the white-breasted nuthatch turns up mainly in hardwood forests and in woods that include a mix of hardwoods and softwoods, the red-breasted nuthatch is, on the whole, a conifer or softwood specialist. Where there are pines, spruces, firs, and tamaracks in the cooler parts of North America, there are red-breasted nuthatches.

If you’re a stickler for accuracy in language, you may find it hard to forgive the red-breasted nuthatch its breast. It’s no more red than is the tail of a red-tailed hawk. In both cases, the color is more accurately termed rusty. But “red-breasted” sounds better than “rusty-breasted,” so maybe that’s why the former stuck.

The red-breasted is a stubbier version of the white-breasted but is no less handsome. In fact, the male red-breasted, which adds a rakish black-and-white eye stripe to its rusty breast and belly and blue-gray back, ranks among the prettiest birds of our woods. In my part of the Adirondacks, where northern conifers grow thick on the ground, we’re fortunate to see red-breasted nuthatches year-round. Others have to settle for seeing them only or chiefly in winter.

Often we hear nuthatches before we see them. The songs and calls they make consist of honks: nasal bursts of sound that help nuthatches stand out from the crowd. I just made a quick survey of trusted ornitho-logical references on my bookshelves, and not one of them offers a succinct, useful trick for telling the voice of the white-breasted from the voice of its cousin. One says the white-breasted’s voice is higher, another that the red-breasted utters the higher pitch. That makes me feel better. Every time I think I’ve mastered, at long last, the knack of telling their voices apart, I find myself at sea, so to speak, in the woods.

The important thing is that it’s easy with practice to differentiate a nuthatch’s broadcast from all the others made by birds in the woods. From that first step, one has only to find the bird and ogle it to know which you’ve had the good fortune to discover.

21. MUNCHKIN KINGS OF THE FOREST

If I were the king of the forest, miniaturized, I might be called a kinglet. But there’s no need for that. Eastern forests are inhabited, if not ruled by, two mini-kings with feathers: the golden-crowned kinglet and the ruby-crowned.

Out walking today, I caught a flash of bird winging through the air and landing on a balsam bough. I hadn’t had time to notice anything beyond its tiny size when the bird spoke loudly. Seet! it said, and Seet! again. Aha! The bird was a golden-crowned kinglet.

It perched in plain view, yet only for an instant—just long enough to flick its wings, a nervous habit of kinglets. The bird’s back was colored olive green, the wings were marked with corporal’s stripes, and black lines ran above, below, and through dark eyes on a white background. I didn’t see the golden crown. Often you do, but this bird was in a hurry, and the colorful crest on top of its head was not fluffed up as it would have been if the bird was displaying for a rival or prospective mate.

I knew the kinglet wasn’t a ruby-crowned because ruby crowns have drab green cheeks with bold white rings around the eyes. Ruby-crowned kinglets are also a touch larger than golden-crowns, about four-and-a-half inches to the smaller bird’s four. This creature was small, even for a kinglet.

As advertised, a male ruby-crowned kinglet has a bold red patch on top of its head. The female, lacking the red, may well be the plainest bird in the woods.

Biologist and author Bernd Heinrich points out the irony of the golden-crowned kinglet. It’s the world’s smallest songbird, he says, yet it lives in some of the coldest places. A general rule of biogeography is that the animals of cold places tend to be larger than the animals of warm places, even within the same species. Bulk may have an adaptive value because big animals have a lower ratio of surface area to volume than small animals do. This may help them conserve heat in the cold.

In his illuminating book Winter World (Ecco, 2003), Heinrich tells of investigations into the cold-weather diet of golden-crowned kinglets. With regret, and with the appropriate permits, he killed several kinglets and examined their stomach contents. To his surprise, the gizzards and stomachs contained no springtails—tiny, insect-like invertebrates. The scientific literature suggested that springtails provided the greater part of the bird’s cold-weather diet.

Yet Heinrich found something fascinating. The stomachs contained an abundance of caterpillars—which seemed odd in winter. Heinrich sent the caterpillars to an entomologist for identification. The expert was stumped, although he was certain the caterpillars were the larva of a geometrid moth. He just couldn’t be sure which one.

Heinrich, whose company I have enjoyed on a couple of occasions, is never one to give up easily. He marched into the woods where the kinglets lived and, with the help of students, shook the trees. No springtails turned up, but from the branches, tiny caterpillars fell. The insects matched those Heinrich had extracted from kinglet stomachs. This time, a Smithsonian entomologist was recruited to help identify them. Yet even he was at a loss.

So Heinrich did the next logical thing. He reared some of the caterpillars. His colleague at the Smithsonian promised that the moths the caterpillars turned into would clinch an identification.

There were setbacks, and years passed. But with perseverance Heinrich was at last able to send his colleague the adult moths. Bingo! They were one-spotted variants, a common species but one not known previously to endure winter in the larval, or caterpillar, stage.

All this might sound arcane, but the subject is of supreme interest to the golden-crowned kinglet. These miniscule, fragile-looking birds endure 40 degree below 0 nights in the woods. The digestion of food in their bellies keeps them warm. In Heinrich’s woods, that food is gathered by birds as stubbornly persistent as Heinrich, ones with eyes sharp enough to detect unmoving and almost microscopic prey.

22. BLUEBIRDS SHOP AROUND

Our son Ned, six at the time, hammered together a bluebird house late one winter. The box came as a kit for Christmas. With my help, Ned joined the sides and roof, screwed in a removable bottom, and attached the finished product to a cedar post in front of his favorite tree, a quaking aspen we look out on from the front porch.

Today, a female eastern bluebird landed on top of the box. A moment later, a male dropped from a nearby tree, hung by his claws from the front, and poked his head inside. Ned wasn’t around to witness the visits, and perhaps that’s just as well. Bluebirds that come to our grassy clearing in the Adirondack woods are so fussy about choosing a nest site that it can drive an observer batty.

The story that’s been unfolding here over the course of a week or more typifies what happens year after year. A male bluebird arrives. He seems to love the place, perching on every birdhouse in sight and belting out his burry warble from singing posts far and wide.

After a few days go by, a female comes. She’s similar in form but a lot less blue. We can tell she’s arrived even before we see her. All at once the male commences singing at thrice the volume and ten times the frequency.

We’ve learned not to expect the birds to get right down to family business. Their courtship is a slow dance. The male, landing on and poking into boxes all week, escorts the female around the neighborhood. He flies to a box, sings on top of it, peers inside, and sometimes vanishes into the interior for a minute or two. Eventually, usually after he’s moved away, she takes her own look.

A watcher might expect this to be the beginning and end of a box’s candidacy, yet it is not. The prospective mother bluebird may demonstrate persistent interest in a house, then all of a sudden turn tail on it and never come back. Rooting for the birds to choose a particular domicile for young they might raise is about as effective as rooting for a horse in a race. Better to sit back and enjoy the show than to invite frustration by picking a favorite.

Today, three boxes took their turns. First it was Ned’s. Second was a scruffy birdhouse purchased at a hardware store, one that for the first time in a decade doesn’t have tree swallows nesting in it. Third was a box down in the lower garden, one I knocked together years ago out of odds and ends.

The box I most wanted the bluebirds to raise young in is the one they’ve ignored. It’s the class of the fleet, a redwood masterpiece built by my old friend, Beresford Proctor. Inside is a varnished wooden plaque. It says: “My 3001st, made specially for Ed Kanze, Beresford Proctor, Mamaroneck, New York, 1988.”

Proctor, a retired banker from Larchmont, did more than anyone to bring back the eastern bluebird to Westchester County, New York, just north of New York City. In a workshop in his cellar, he nailed up boxes of his own design from redwood scraps supplied to him by a sauna factory. I don’t know what his total was by the end of his life, but I do know that he never accepted payment for a box, and that he delivered them in the trunk of his powder blue Mercedes-Benz sedan to nature sanctuaries and golf courses from Pound Ridge to Scarsdale.

Where will the bluebirds sing and snoop tomorrow? Will they start building a nest? I have purged my soul of expectations. The couple may flutter with excitement over one, two, or all three of our vacant boxes. Or, as happens in more years than not, they may, in their final analysis, find our place wanting and beat wings for the county line.

23. WHEN THE RED RED ROBINS

Among our fair-weather birds that flock back in springtime, none is more universally recognized and welcomed than the American robin. Suddenly, after a winter of scarcity (you might see an occasional flock eking by on berries now and again), robins are conspicuous presences on every piece of open turf. I remember playing Little League baseball as a kid and having to dodge them in April and May on the ballfield. Springtime and robins and baseball diamonds go well together.

There’s not much to dislike about robins. I remember days when I could hardly identify any wild birds, at least with certainty, and robins were my only sure bet. You can hardly go wrong naming them. They’re big, boldly colored, fairly predictable in where they turn up and what they do, and their songs are probably the easiest of the ornithological Top Forty to learn.

As a few English bird watchers have pointed out to me in censorious tones over the years, the American robin is not, in fact, a robin. It’s a thrush. My reply to the corrective is to shrug my shoulders. We North Americans are off the hook. It was no doubt a homesick English settler who first saw orange-breasted thrushes in North America and proclaimed them robins.

That was just the beginning. According to Ernest A. Choate’s Dictionary of American Bird Names, English settlers in North America did not stop applying “robin” to our continent’s birds after they affixed it to a thrush. They kept on going and gave us the “sea robin” (the duck we today know as the red-breasted merganser), the “ground robin” (now known as the eastern towhee), the “golden robin” (Baltimore oriole), and the “Canadian robin” (the cedar waxwing). And for the record, the European robins of England were, until recently, placed by ornithologists in the thrush family.

Today, in the eyes of experts, the American robin is still a thrush (family Turdidae), the English robin is an Old World flycatcher (family Muscicapidae), and the “robins” of Australia and New Zealand, also named by homesick travelers from the British Isles, are Australasian robins (family Petroicidae). The most glamorous of all the non-tribe may well be the scarlet robin of southeastern and southwestern Australia. It’s black and white and red all over, a real stunner.

Watching American robins hop across a lawn on a spring day, pausing now and again to yank earthworms native to England and Europe from the ground, I often find myself humming “When the Red Red Robin,” composed by Harry Woods in 1926. Lillian Roth made it her signature song, Doris Day had a hit with it in 1953, and Bing Crosby jazzed it up beautifully in the 1950s. Still, Al Jolson’s cover always comes first to mind. Jolson hammered this song, much like he hammered every other that came out of his brassy throat. Yet with “Red Red Robin,” Jolson gave posterity the definitive version, or at least he did to my ear. Robin-lovers and Jolson fans can listen to it on YouTube.

As for finding the American robin, that’s even easier. Get thee to a wormery, a patch of soft, sun-warmed earth where earthworms wriggle and embrace each other in slimy, bristly full-body holds. And listen. Our robin is no shrinking violet. While the females haul mud to make their substantial adobe nests, the males sing and sing and sing.

The American robin’s carol of courtship and territory might be described as a robust warble, one that works its way up and down the scale. Between songs, the males often giggle at each other. There’s no humor in these giggles. Male robins seem to utter them when trying to drive each other away from mates and prospective mates.

“Wake up, wake up, get out of bed,” sings the robin, or at least it does according to Harry Woods. Many a spring day, early in the morning, its voice is the inspiration that finally drives my feet onto the floor.

24. MR. BICKNELL’S THRUSH

Eugene Pintard Bicknell took his final breath at home on Long Island, near New York City, on February 9, 1925. He was sixty-six. The Auk: A Quarterly Journal of Ornithology published an obituary by his colleague Maunsell Schieffelin Crosby the following April. It says many things about Bicknell, including this:

“Mr. Bicknell was very modest and retiring, seldom went to scientific meetings or mingled with his fellow naturalists, and cared nothing for clubs and social diversion. Low voiced and quiet, his manners would be described as courtly and old-fashioned by the present generation. While reserved, he was nevertheless of kindly disposition and was helpful to many younger students.”

In short, Bicknell seems to have been one of those kindly, self-effacing people who do good work with a generous spirit and slip quietly from the world without leaving much of a trace. He would likely be forgotten today if not for a thrush, which is a kind of songbird. The American robin is a thrush. So is the eastern bluebird.

In 1881, in spruce-fir forest near the summit of Slide Mountain in the Catskills, Bicknell, an amateur ornithologist and botanist of professional stature, came upon a bird that seemed to lie outside the scientific literature. It looked a good deal like a gray-cheeked thrush but was smaller, and it sang a different song. Bicknell became convinced he’d discovered a new species.

But not so fast. The celebrated ornithologist Robert Ridgway, curator of birds at the United States National Museum in Washington, scoffed. When he published the bird’s official description in the scientific literature, he opined that Bicknell’s thrush was merely a subspecies of the gray-cheeked thrush, Catharus minimus. And so the bird became known to experts as Catharus minimus bicknelli. The Catskill Mountain naturalist and nature writer John Burroughs, after climbing Slide and finding the bird in June 1885, suggested it be known as the Slide Mountain thrush.

Burroughs gives us the classic description of the Bicknell’s voice, one that is still often quoted. The passage first appeared in an essay titled “The Heart of the Southern Catskills,” published by the Century Magazine in 1888. Burroughs writes: “The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was like a musical whisper of great sweetness and power.”

In time, as ornithology shifted from describing and naming birds to studying their behavior, it became known that the gray-cheeked thrush is—brace yourself for a tricky mouthful of a word—polygynandrous. This is to say it generally mates in a sort of social group, with more than one male mating with, and helping raise the young of, more than one female. The breeding pattern likely helps the birds succeed in raising young in the harsh, challenging mountaintop and northern forest environments where it spends summers.

Those who cheer on underdogs will be pleased to know that soft-spoken, earnest, monogamous Eugene Bicknell had the last word on his thrush. Or at least the current word. A reassessment of the bird’s status by ornithologist Henri Ouellet in 1993 led two years later to the Bicknell’s being granted recognition as a unique species. Today scientists know the bird as Catharus bicknelli.

Field studies show that Eugene Bicknell’s thrush breeds not just on the balsam-scented heights of Slide Mountain, where I’ve had the pleasure of seeing and hearing it, but also on other high mountain summits in the Adirondacks, Catskills, and New England, and in recovering clear-cuts in eastern Quebec and Nova Scotia. Partly because it winters on the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, where deforestation is extensive and advancing, and partly because its breeding grounds are threatened by acid precipitation and mercury deposition from coal-burning, conservationists consider Bicknell’s thrush a bird at risk.

See it if you can, while you can. By all means hear it, too. The song is pure magic. So are the places where it fills crisp, cold, mountain air with music.

25. OLD BIRDS, NEW TRICKS

It’s always satisfying when you ask a question, and then by good luck and coincidence the answer falls in your lap.

So it went with me one recent morning. I saw a flock of birds called cedar waxwings perched in a tall cranberry viburnum bush. These birds are passionate fruit-eaters. A day or two earlier, I’d seen a dozen or so of them descend on the same bush when it still held a few dozen tart drupes. The fruits are so sour that birds largely ignore them in the fall and may stay clear through most of the winter. Only as waxwings and other frugivores become desperate for food late in the winter and early spring do I see the bright red berries of our cranberry viburnums begin to disappear.

A few blazing red drupes remained the day the waxwings arrived from wherever they’d spent the winter. Then, in the space of a few minutes, they stripped off every one.

I wondered if the waxwings would leave the neighborhood, perhaps flitting off to another patch of viburnum somewhere. But they didn’t. They stayed. And they’re still here.

In a couple of weeks, wild strawberries will ripen by the hundreds in our yard. No sooner will we begin scheming to harvest them and make exquisitely delicious wild strawberry shortcakes than cedar waxwings will swoop down by the dozen. They strip the plants bare, but I find it hard to begrudge them. We’ve lived on these eighteen acres a mere twenty-one years. The waxwings and their forebears have been feasting on “our” wild strawberries for centuries—or, more likely, for millennia.

Yesterday morning, a pivotal question arose. What are the waxwings eating now? I see them chase down the occasional flying insect, but mostly I see the birds perched on branches, looking patient and expectant. It’s as if they’re waiting for the wild strawberries to turn red, and they’ll fast until they do. Still, given the zest with which they feed, I’m guessing they’re not fasting.

What are the waxwings eating? The question nettled me as I walked up our driveway and blundered into the answer. I watched a half dozen or so of the birds wing in from elsewhere and land in the branches of a crabapple tree. The tree is in full flower. Instantly the waxwings busied themselves among the blossoms. Petals fluttered to the ground.

At first I reckoned the waxwings were plucking insects from the blossoms, and the falling petals represented nothing more than what commercial fishermen call “bycatch.” Then I watched in amazement as a waxwing plucked a brilliant white petal, mashed the thing like someone might chew a potato chip, and swallowed.

Birds eating flower petals? I’d never heard of such a thing, and I’d certainly not observed it. Yet as I continued to watch, the birds snatched up petal after petal, nibbled each in a desultory sort of way, and swallowed. One by one, bits of crabapple flowers vanished into the maws of these birds while the occasional discard, crumb, or misplaced item dropped to the ground.

Apparently I’m not the first to make this discovery. A Google search proved that while a few bits and pieces have been published about the waxwing’s petal-eating, photographers have documented it thoroughly. Maybe the birds are on to something. I found a natural foods website peddling apple petals. It described them as “highly aromatic with nuances of wild rose, jasmine, water lily and honey,” with a “delicate texture” and a taste that’s “subtle with a sweet honeysuckle quality.” Apparently the waxwings know what they’re doing.

26. BOHEMIANS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The world being what it is, I suppose it was inevitable Bohemians would turn up at our place. One morning I stepped out the kitchen door, took a few steps, had a feeling I was being watched, and looked over my shoulder. And there, perched in the upper branches of a wild black cherry tree, were twenty-five of them, more or less.

These Bohemians did not fit the Webster’s dictionary meaning of “a person (as a writer or an artist) living an unconventional life [usually] in a colony with others,” at least not exactly. But they did match another definition, that of being a “vagabond” or “wanderer.” These were not people but birds, and they were on the move and traveling in a group.

I spun around. Yes, these were not cedar waxwings, common where most of us live during the warm months. They were their larger, more glamorous, more northerly cousins. Bohemian waxwings spend summers way up north in Alaska, the Yukon, and the northwestern provinces of Canada. In fall and winter they descend latitudinally to milder climes. Some of them, typically moving in tight flocks, find their way to woods, swamps, brushy old fields, and backyards in the Northeast.

The Bohemian waxwing is a stunner. It’s got the same sort of peaked crest and seamless body plumage the more familiar cedar waxwing has, although the Bohemian tends to appear more gray than tan and the cedar more tan than gray. The Bohemian sports similar waxy red tips on the secondary feathers of the wings, and also like the cedar, it has a black chin, black stripe across its face on each side, and a bold yellow band across the outer reach of the tail.

These features make it glamorous, but there’s more. The Bohemian waxwing, unlike the cedar, has two bold splashes of white on each wing, plus a sort of lightning bolt of yellow streaking down the tips of the flight feathers. I gasped with pleasure the first time I saw Bohemians—a decade or so ago, in a swamp miles down the road from our house. And I gasped in delight yesterday to see them perched a few feet from our back door.

Bohemian waxwings, like cedar waxwings (named, by the way, for their interest in red cedar “berries” which are actually cones), are major fruit eaters, especially in winter. No doubt the flock at our place had been attracted by a crabapple tree we’d planted sixteen or seventeen years ago. That fall, the tree had borne its first bumper crop of fruit. There were so many little sour apples, in fact, that the trunk stooped under the weight.

Only a fraction of the fruits remained, but happily, there were enough to lure the Bohemians. Flying at speed in tight formations, Bohemian waxwings keep on the lookout for berries, drupes, pomes, and other fruit in the branches of trees and shrubs.

The birds will often stay with a tree for hours or days, paying little attention to bird watchers, photographers, and other admirers. They typically linger as long as the banquet lasts. Then, poof! They vanish, often not to be seen again in the neighborhood for years.

As I focused binoculars on one of the birds, I hoped our Bohemians would follow the usual pattern and stay a while. I took a few quiet, cautious steps to gain a better angle. While I blinked, a whoosh reached my ears. Where the flock had perched only a fraction of a second earlier I saw only empty branches.

Quickly scanning the sky, I found the Bohemians covering distance at astonishing speed. They were hundreds of yards away already, piling on distance by the second. “Come back!” I wanted to cry. But I knew better. Bohemians relish their own unpredictability, or seem to, and always go where they please. They never came back, at least that year.

27. VISITOR FROM THE ARCTIC

Late one cloudy afternoon, with the day’s light well-faded, a bird caught my eye. It appeared to be a sparrow. The silent apparition stood in a muddy patch of driveway, looking away from me, not doing much of anything.

I might have glanced away and never glanced again, but even without binoculars, something about the visitor announced its differentness. Maybe it was a matter of posture. While the bird was brown of back, pale down under, and covered with a miscellany of stripes and streaks, as sparrows generally are, there was something about its bearing, more horizontal than vertical, that didn’t quite say sparrow.

So I ran for binoculars. My heart rate kicked up a few notches. The bird was too chunky to be any sparrow I’d ever seen, and its back was streaked so boldly in black, brown, and white that I felt certain I’d never seen its like. Had the light been brighter, I might have noted rusty highlights on the back and wings.

The bird turned, showing its profile. The side of its face was stunning. A bold black triangle on the cheek was edged by an arc of something close to gold. Inside the black triangle lay a handsome patch of buff. Now I knew with certainty. My eyes were fixed on a bird I’d never before seen, one that, after I’d identified it, would represent a first for the biological survey we’re conducting of our property.

A neuron buried deep in my brain lit up. It said, “Longspur.” Maybe that could be it.

I hadn’t seen a longspur of any kind in years. Longspurs were considered cousins of sparrows until recent DNA work led taxonomists to pluck them out of the sparrow family Emberizidae and place them in a new family, Calcariidae, along with snow buntings and McKay’s buntings.

Out came a stack of books. I studied plumages. Nothing quite matched until I took a close look at the female Lapland longspur. Unfortunately, by the time I was feeling certain that this was our bird, a bird that breeds in the far northern reaches of North America, Europe, and Asia and winters well to the south, night had fallen.

I’d thrown some cracked corn out on the driveway, and the longspur, if that’s indeed what it was, pecked hungrily at the stuff. So I shook some more out of the bag. My hope was that morning would bring the bird back for another look.

Not long after the kids climbed on the school bus the following day, the bird materialized again in the spot where I’d seen it. Now I knew exactly what to look for. Rusty patches on the wings and back? Check. White outer tail feathers? I saw these when the bird, perhaps sore from so much migrating, did a Tai chi move. Everything matched for female Lapland longspur, right down to the pale belly, soft streaks along the flanks and across the upper breast, and silvery stripe running over the crown between two swaths of not-quite-black.

The bird lingered for a day, faithful to its spot in the driveway. It returned promptly and reliably after occasional interruptions by passing kids and cars. I photographed it, talked to it, rejoiced in its exotic presence.

Then, the following morning, it was gone.

This summer, on some remote, windswept patch of tundra in the far, far North, I like to think that our visitor, if it survives the long and hazardous journey to its breeding ground, will find a mate and help raise a brood of young—little gorgeous sweet-voiced longspurs that will benefit, in some small way, from the warm reception one of their parents received at our place.

28. WELCOMING WOOD-WARBLERS

Some spring day, usually before I see it, I hear what for me is the first warbler of the year. The sound might be a soft, wavering rattle, or a series of paired descending notes, uttered staccato (chip chip, chep chep, chup chup), or a string of thin notes see-sawing back and forth between a higher and a lower pitch. With sound, returning warblers make their presence known.

The first voice I’ve described belongs to the yellow-rumped warbler, which when I first started paying attention to it was known as the myrtle warbler. You might hear it almost anywhere.

The second is the calling card of a warbler that, aside from its small size and delicate bill, looks much like a typical forest thrush (brown breast, streaked light breast). It’s known as the northern waterthrush. You’re most likely to hear it in a swamp or some other place where you soak your boots trying to get a look.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The third is the morning announcement of the black-and-white warbler, which might well be called the zebra warbler for its dramatic black and white stripes.

While most of us call these birds “warblers,” ornithologists put a finer point on their collective name and insist that they are “wood-warblers.” The first birds known in English as “warblers” belong to another family, the Sylviidae, or Old World warblers. Since most of our warblers don’t warble, putting “wood” in front of the name is all right with me.

Those who observe and enjoy wild birds consider the return of wood-warblers in springtime a highlight of the natural year. Early wood-warbler migrants may start to turn up when snow still lingers on the ground, which in our part of the Adirondacks generally means late April. But these first arrivals are outliers. The real wave comes in late May, with stragglers sometimes not making their presence known until June.

I don’t have a favorite wood-warbler, but I’m partial to the northern waterthrush. It arrives early, even in the cold northern reaches of our region, and it sings and breeds in a variety of habitats, generally near water. In the southern parts of its range, breeding tends to be confined, at least from my experience, to shady swamps. The thick vegetation haunted by the bird, and its lack of bright colors, makes it hard to see. Yet look for its wagging tail and learn the song, which tends to be frequently and sometimes incessantly uttered, and you won’t be disappointed.

For color, it’s hard to beat a Blackburnian warbler. This beauty, named for the eighteenth-century English naturalist Anna Blackburn, sports, at least on the glamorous male, black streaks set against a blazing orange background. The female, camouflaged and less likely to draw attention to the nest, is by comparison drab.

On a day in late spring, if I’m hiking and find myself suddenly among eastern hemlock trees, I know I can pause and listen, and almost always I’ll hear this warbler. It took me years to develop confidence in identifying the bird’s voice because it sings two markedly different songs. One, in a rendering by Roger Tory Peterson, sounds like “zip zip zip titi tseeeeee.” Good luck pronouncing those syllables. Think of thin notes at a high pitch, the final slurred one rocketing into the stratosphere.

The other song of the Blackburnian suggests the voice of the Nashville warbler. One would think a bird called “Nashville warbler” would sing country music, but it doesn’t, at least not to my ear. The song is two-parted, beginning with alternating squeaky notes on two pitches and then dropping, or rising, to a quick trill. The Blackburnian varies the theme. To me, it sounds less emphatic and more laid back. If you’re getting the impression it can be tricky to tell these two bird voices apart, you’re right. It is. Practice will help you learn them if you choose to do so. In the meantime, if you’re standing beneath the graceful green boughs of hemlocks, bet on Blackburnian, and keep looking.

29. DO THEIR CUPS RUNNETH OVER?

High, tinkling notes rain from the sky. Puzzled, I peer through the grid of limbs, twigs, and leaves overhead to see if I can spy the singer. All I glimpse through a blue window is a brown shape, plummeting like an autumn leaf. The outburst grows louder as the shape grows nearer. It concludes with a snatch of “teacher-Teacher-TEACHER!”

The bird I’ve heard is an ovenbird, a wood-warbler named for its habit of roofing over its nest like the cover over a Dutch oven. Why does this particular ovenbird, generally an earthbound singer, forsake the relative safety of the forest, where its camouflage serves it well, to climb into the lethal realm of falcons, and there, lest it go unnoticed, broadcast such a clamor?

In the animal world, risky behavior tends to be indulged for good reason. I suppose the ovenbird is showing off for rivals and his mate. Perhaps competing male ovenbirds are only put in their places by an occasional hell-for-leather stunt flight of this caliber. Or maybe it’s female ovenbirds who demand it, ones who require of their mates a certain number of death-defying professions of devotion. Perhaps it’s both.

The ovenbird staged the play just once in my presence, then went back to its usual habits of singing from low limbs and the branches of understory trees ten or twenty feet above the ground. Yet I was delighted. It’s always fun when an old dog teaches you a new trick.

Nearly twenty years have passed since the day I witnessed my first warbler flight song. The daredevil on the initial occasion was not an oven-bird, but a close cousin of it called the worm-eating warbler. With the expert coaching of my late friend John Van Valkenburg, who possessed an almost clairvoyant ability to discover hidden birds’ nests, I’d found a grass-lined cup full of baby worm-eating warblers and spent a week photographing it.

Days passed, and I thought I’d seen all the worm-eaters could show me. They flitted through the forest, snatched up assorted bugs, spiders, and inchworms, and stuffed the tidbits down the throats of their nestlings, with time out now and again for a metallic, insect-like trill by the male. Then one evening, Father Warbler seemed to lose his mind.

He turned his back on home and family, and like a staid, gray-haired banker or insurance agent discovering his inner showman, flew up through the trees and into the sky beyond and commenced a performance much like the ovenbird’s. He did it two or three times. Then, having gotten the whole thing out of his system, the wood-warbler settled back into the comparatively sedate life of the working parent.

A hundred years ago, naturalists such as John Burroughs offered a poetic explanation for these flights of fancy. Burroughs called such atypical singing by warblers an “air song” or “song of ecstasy.” He believed that a surfeit of joy inspired it.

Who can say Burroughs is wrong? About the same time I heard and watched the ovenbird sing and soar above the treetops, our then twenty-two-month-old son used to exhibit similar behavior. In those days Ned would get so happy sometimes when we took him outdoors that he’d run away from his parents, exultant, head and shoulders thrown back, singing and gurgling in pure joyous effusion. Witnessing his flight songs, like catching ovenbirds or worm-eating warblers in the act, was a rare treat—whatever it meant.

30. BAY-WINGED BUNTING

Audubon knew the bird as the bay-winged bunting. Thoreau, who was besotted and wrote rhapsodies about it, called it the baywing, the bay-wing, or the grass finch. At our house, we give the bird the name that seems to have been coined for it by the Catskill Mountain naturalist and nature writer John Burroughs.

“The two white lateral quills in his tail, and his [and her] habit of running and skulking a few yards in advance of you as you walk through the fields, are sufficient to identify him [or her},” Burroughs writes in “The Return of the Birds.” The essay opens Burroughs’s first nature book, Wake-Robin (1871).

Burroughs continues. “Add the best parts of the lay of the [song sparrow] to the sweet vibrating chant of the wood sparrow [field sparrow], and you have the evening hymn of the vesper-bird,—the poet of the plain unadorned pastures.” Today’s bird books and bird watchers call Burroughs’s “vesper-bird” the vesper sparrow.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

With only a small open grassland at our place, we see and hear vesper sparrows only occasionally. One week, perhaps overly eager to welcome another one, we tried to talk ourselves into believing that an unseen sparrow caroling in the yard was a vesper. Further investigation, however, proved that our singing visitor was, in fact, an American tree sparrow. We knew tree sparrows well by sight but not by voice. This one was stopping to grab some seeds, bugs, and spiders before continuing on to its far breeding grounds in northern Canada.

After the tree sparrow was gone, the vesper sparrow remained lodged in my brain. It’s a bird I hadn’t seen often, or at least haven’t recognized often. The vesper is common in the right places, but it’s well camouflaged and just about dissolves into the fields where it breeds. In our neck of the Adirondack woods, I have few opportunities to wade through fields, and so vesper sparrows and I rarely find ourselves eye to eye.

Perhaps because the vesper sparrow is found locally, yet I hardly ever see it, the bird haunts me. It’s something I feel I ought to see more often and leaves me feeling that, as a bird watcher, I’m not quite up to snuff.

Between sightings, I take pleasure in various paeans to the bird embedded in the writings of Thoreau and Burroughs. Thoreau sketched a vivid verbal description in a journal entry dated April 13, 1855. “See a sparrow without marks on throat or breast,” he writes, “running peculiarly in the dry grass in the open field beyond, and hear its song, and then see its white feathers in tail; the baywing.”

The Massachusetts naturalist’s warmest praise for the sparrow appeared in his journal entry of May 12, 1857. “I hear from across the fields,” he writes, “the note of the bay-wing, Come here here there there quick quick or I’m gone. . . . It instantly translates me from the sphere of my walk and repairs all the world that we jointly inhabit. . . . The spirit of its earthsong, of its serene and true philosophy, was breathed into me, and I saw the world as through a glass.”

Two years later, Thoreau proposed that when you hear this bird sing, you are convinced “that the world is beautiful and life is a fair enterprise to engage in.”

Burroughs, a tad less poetic than Thoreau but with a better knack for recording the actual details of natural phenomena, gives a fine account of the vesper sparrow’s song. It begins, he wrote, with “two or three long, silver notes of peace and rest, ending in some subdued trills and quavers. . . . Such unambitious, quiet, unconscious melody! It is one of the most characteristic sounds in nature. The grass, the stones, the stubble, the furrow, the quiet herds, and the warm twilight among the hills; are all subtly expressed in this song.”

I’ll be listening more closely from now on.

31. CONFESSIONS OF A CEREAL KILLER

All right, all right. Autumn is upon us, bringing portends of a winter I do not expect to survive. I am old. Six years and three months ago I burst from an egg, which means, at least for a songbird, I’m borrowing time.

To leave the fields, pastures, and meadows of this world with a conscience as clear as the one I arrived with, there are things I must get off my unspotted breast. They are dark things, not transgressions against my own kind, although there have been a few of those, but worse, crimes against the generous hands that feed me.

I am, you see, a field sparrow and a cereal killer.

Oh, I slay insects in quantity, too, especially in summer when they occur in staggering number and all but cry out for culling. Yet their destruction and consumption bring me no remorse. They are consumers and parasites of other forms of life, as are animals in general. It seems fitting, then, that I should devour them while I live and that they should reduce me to bits and pieces after I die.

No, it’s my plant victims I mourn. They make magic with carbon dioxide, water, and sunshine and out of thin air harvest the energy that sustains the rest of us. They are peace-loving. Standing patiently in the sunshine, minding their own vital business, they grow and make subtle romance with each other and produce legions of blameless offspring.

And what do we field sparrows do to thank them? We take our pink bills and crush their embryonic heirs without mercy.

Most of all I apologize to all the crabgrasses and foxtail grasses whose seeds I have slaughtered. These paragons of all that is right and good in the world have sustained me from youth to old age. Yet what have I done to them? I have plucked up the fruits of their reproductive labors and crunched them like popcorn.

That’s not all. I have combed open spaces for panic-grasses and, when I’ve found them, raked in their tender progeny without regard for their own reasons for living. Dropseed grasses? Whenever I spy them, I pop their kernels into my maw and in my gizzard mash them into a creamy pâté.

Through it all, I sing a loud, prideful song. You have heard me. My notes begin full and round, often keeping a steady pitch, punctuated by distinct silences between them. Then comes a mad accelerando that blurs sound into sound. A hard ball bouncing on a wooden floor gives a sense of my rhythm.

Simon Pease Cheney, writing in 1892 of my song, had this to say: “When we consider the genius displayed in combining so beautifully the three grand principles of sound—length, pitch, and power—its brevity and limited compass make it all the more wonderful. . . . This little musician has explored the whole realm of sound, and condensed its beauties in perfection.”

Genius? Perfection? Guilty as charged, I’m afraid. But I digress.

I am a cereal killer, and I repent. Now I go to my rest in peace.

32. FIRST WILD SONGS OF SPRING

Spring would arrive on the twenty-first of March, so insisted the calendar. Truth was, signs were already in the air.

One mid-February day, on the coldest morning of the winter, I heard a black-capped chickadee sing. Deeee-dee-dee, it whistled soulfully, the notes resonating poignantly in the midst of snow and ice. Why was it jumping the gun? I suspect the bird was cheered, as I was, by a bright sunshine far more warm on the skin than the wan light of December.

Lengthening days, diminishing darkness, and the sun’s increased wattage had put the chickadee in the know. Birds recognize these sorts of things, even if the rest of us are too busy to take note and cheer.

A few days later, when I went walking with my then three-year-old son, Ned, and twenty-month-old daughter, Tasman, we caught a sneak preview of another spring carol. I heard a rush of whistled notes coming at a breakneck pace from somewhere high in the treetops. It took me a few seconds to listen and consider before I recognized the source. Somewhere nearby, a male purple finch, a bird likened by Roger Tory Peterson to “a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice,” had opened its bill and warbled.

There must be magic in that juice, for a purple finch can belt out its song with as much energy and excitement as any bird alive. The notes rush out and pick up speed as they race toward a crescendo of upslurred phrases. The birds are beautiful, but as much as I appreciate their looks, I love their songs even more.

Knowing I’m fallible where song identification is concerned, and eager for a chance to show the kids the vocalist, I pursed my lips and “spished,” as bird watchers call the making of hissing sounds to hoodwink birds into thinking a predator has moved into the neighborhood. (The sound crudely approximates warning sounds made by chickadees and various other small songbirds when they spy danger.) Sometimes the trick works. This was one of those happy occasions. I spished on and off for a couple of minutes, and by the time I was done, the trees around us bustled with agitated birds.

They came in four types: little gray birds with black caps and black bibs (the same black-capped chickadees mentioned earlier), little blue-gray birds with rusty undersides and bold white eye-stripes (redbreasted nuthatches), birds that looked like sparrows dipped in raspberry juice, and birds that looked exactly like the raspberry sparrows, except that they’d been dunked not in juice but in water. The latter were purple finch females or juvenile males.

Female songbirds generally make a variety of short, practical sounds but don’t broadcast long, complex songs like the males. Notable exceptions are female Baltimore orioles, northern cardinals, and possibly purple finches. Whenever I hear a purple finch song that’s rich and melodic but brief, I check with binoculars and generally find its creator to be female. Or a juvenile male. The two are often impossible to tell apart.

That’s how it often goes with critics, female purple finches included. They’re more adept at judging the work of others than they are at performing their own material. But that’s all right. One of the most important jobs of a female songbird is to size up males based on voices and repertoires. The male that sings long and well is probably strong, healthy, brainy, and will be a good provider, too.

Several male finches filled the air with song yesterday, and I intend no pun when I say their performances were music to my ears. Cold weather will stay with us a while. Until it breaks, it’ll remain a pleasure to hear from anyone and anything that can peer over the calendar’s horizon and report warmth looming on the other side.

33. THEY COME, THEY GO, THEY COME AGAIN

Song sparrows turned up in our Adirondack yard a couple of days ago, singing and foraging for seeds, insect eggs, and whatever else might be good to eat. They’d been gone for months. Then suddenly one cold, brittle spring morning, they were back.

That’s how it goes with migratory birds. They come, they go, and if all goes well, they come again. Each keeps to its own schedule. Each flies without airline tickets to and from its wintering ground.

Birds seem to know exactly when to return in spring. You are justified in being impressed by their often impeccable timing, but don’t be too impressed. Sometimes birds are dead wrong.

I’ve seen eastern phoebes, which are flycatchers, lying cold and dead on the ground when their reappearance was followed by a prolonged hard freeze. And I remember one exceptionally snowy spring when I worked in a suburban nature center. Our telephone rang for days on end with sad reports of dead and dying robins.

To put it another way, birds do their best, and a fine best it usually is. Yet they make mistakes, just as the rest of us do. And sometimes, they get everything right, only to have an unforgiving universe teach them a hard lesson in the fickle and fleeting nature of existence.

Where do birds go in winter? Some go hardly far at all. Robins from New York may head no farther south than a berry patch down the road, or, say, New Jersey, Delaware, or North Carolina. The hummingbirds that buzzed in fascination around your red baseball cap last summer may have wintered—if you can call it that—amid the extravagant blossoms of tropical forests on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

In our neck of the woods, we have voluble bobolinks that suddenly materialize in spring to sing loudly and often, raise young, eat a final round of bugs and seeds, then retreat to where they came from. Where they came from may astound you: Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. A bobolink’s journey from its January roost to its July nest may span 12,000 miles.

And consider this. When the bobolink’s sojourning on its winter range, it’s summer. And so the bird enjoys an endless Hawaiian-shirts-and-Bermuda-shorts sort of lifestyle—nice work if you can get it. To get it, the bobolink needs wings, lots of muscle, hollow bones, and enough energy to power those wings and that muscle from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern and back again.

How much awareness do birds have of all this? We don’t know. Some mysteries science may never penetrate, such as getting inside the minds of other species. Still, we can speculate. Does the blue-headed vireo that arrives in our yard each spring know that in a matter of weeks it will leave again? And before the vireo departed its alternate home in Dixie, or in Central America, for our place, did it sense that a dangerous and demanding journey was impending? Did it think to itself, OK, time to eat heartily and put some aviation fuel around the waistline because I’ll soon be flying a long way north? Or did all the preparations happen without conscious thought, and one day the bird simply took off?

Questions, questions! My guess is we’ll never be sure of the answers. Then again, who knows? Scientists keep inventing new means of studying things. Advances in neuroscience have led to the discovery of something experts long suspected: that a variety of birds including bobolinks and woodland thrushes sense the orientation of the earth’s magnetic axis, and they use it for finding their way, even when they cannot see the sun or the stars, from one end of their migration route to the other. If humans could do that, we wouldn’t need road atlases and GPS.

PART THREE

THESE ARE SLIPPERY, SCALY, OR SLIMY

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1. WHAT BULLFROGS WANT

Look a bullfrog in its predatory eye, and be glad you tower over it. The Godzilla of Adirondack frogs can swell to seven or even eight inches in length and weigh a pound or more. Yet while size matters, the most frightening thing about the bullfrog is its appetite. The diet of this massive amphibian is catholic—broad to the point where the ambitious creature of black freshwater lagoons and lakes eats just about anything it wants to. With the hunger comes an interesting twist. Bullfrogs can’t, as we do, subdivide big food items into smaller pieces that can be swallowed. Each main course must be forced in its entirety down the gourmands’ supersized throats.

Insects? Bullfrogs eat them, including the largest dragonflies. Spiders? When available. Fish? Yum, yum. Fellow frogs, including other members of their own species? Yes, without compunction. An Arizona study found that bullfrogs outnumbered all other vertebrates on the bullfrog diet. That’s right: these monsters of freshwater shallows are shameless cannibals.

Moving up the menu from appetizers to entrees, bullfrogs devour turtles, snakes, ducklings, songbirds, and water shrews. The occasional bat? Sure, why not? Muskrats? When small enough. Weasels? Only when they’re foolish enough to wander within gulping distance.

I’ve seen remarkable things in my forty-odd years as a naturalist. One of them was a medium-sized bullfrog with its mouth clamped down on the snout of a hefty green frog. The gladiators were nearly identical in size. Could the bullfrog possibly wrap its stomach around a meal almost as large as it was?

There was only one way to find out: with an Audubon group I was leading, I watched. Over the course of half an hour, the bull worked its maw over the green one excruciating millimeter at a time. By the time I gave up and went home, half the green frog was inside and half remained out. My group, which consisted of schoolteachers and interpretive naturalists, remained behind to see the drama through to its final act.

About midnight, after I’d brushed my teeth, I realized with some concern that my group had still not returned to our dormitory. So I trudged back to the pond. The frogs and my crew remained where I had left them. The battle was almost done. The green frog’s torso was fully inside the bullfrog’s, which looked like an inflated balloon. Two mottled legs, stretched to their utmost in death, or near death, stuck out, the webbed feet grotesquely fanned. Over the course of the next forty-five minutes, the bullfrog continued stuffing its face until only a single piece of its victim protruded: a toe. At this point the victor, looking ready to burst, turned and paddled to the middle of the pond. There, savoring its meal, enduring epic indigestion, or dozing (it’s hard to tell what goes on inside an amphibian’s head), the bullfrog spent the rest of the night and floated all the next morning.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The rapacity of bullfrogs sometimes proves their undoing. Humans with a hankering for frog’s legs need only a pole, a bit of line, and a fishhook. Jiggle a hook in front of a bullfrog and it all but leaps into the frying pan. Adirondack tradition calls for the hook to be baited with red flannel. Truth is, the frogs go for bare hooks just as impulsively. I know because as a teenager, I caught and skinned hundreds. My notions of the good life back then included fresh frogs’ legs for breakfast. My grandmother cooked them in flour and butter.

Bullfrogs want food, and lots of it. We’ve established that. But what else does this moth-and-muskrat-catching behemoth desire? The prolific nature of the species points to the answer. The frogs possess enormous longings for each other—and not just as table fare.

The deep bass voice of the male, bearing erotic and aggressive messages, travels far across lakes and ponds. Most of us recognize it as a signature sound of Adirondack summer nights. Jug-o-rum, jug-o-rum, jug-o-rum, says the bullfrog. The sounds are rhythmic and stirring. Like a songbird broadcasting by day, a bullfrog crooning at night advertises himself to potential mates and lets other males know that his lily-pad-furnished bachelor pad will be defended, violently if necessary.

Catch a male bullfrog singing in a flashlight beam, and you’ll note his impressive yellow vocal pouch. You may also notice his ears. They look like green quarters, one affixed behind each eye.

Males make all the ruckus, but it’s the females who are larger and more lethal and decide which among their suitors gets lucky. Two frogs in the world, the so-called tailed frogs of North America’s Far West, possess what scientists politely call an “intromittent organ.” The rest mate like the bullfrog, which is to say, the male climbs aboard the female’s back, grasping her in a hold called amplexus. When she extrudes her eggs, he anoints them with his sperm.

Mother bullfrog may lay 20,000 eggs. They float together in clumps, each tucked inside a dollop of clear jelly. All sorts of things eat them—insects, birds, newts, turtles—but if all goes well, a percentage develops into tadpoles. Unlike the parents, the tadpoles prefer plants and algae to flesh. Season after season, winter, spring, summer, and fall, they swim and grow. After two or three years, rear legs sprout, then front. And finally, as the larval tails begins to wither, the young frogs become air breathers. It takes four or five years before they’re ready to breed—four or five years full of ravenous eating that continues throughout the frogs’ lives. With luck, a bullfrog might last a decade until death finally stills its voice and desires.

2. OF NEWTS, EFTS, AND SALAMANDERS

Rainy days we tend to see them, little orange salamanders that cut dazzling figures on radiant green moss. Some in the Adirondacks call them newts, others efts. Some people call them lizards. Two out of three are correct.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

These creatures, despite their rough skin, are amphibians, akin to frogs, not lizards, which are reptiles. Newts begin life inside gelatinous egg capsules laid down by their mothers, one at a time, on plants submerged in the cool waters of lakes, ponds, and streams. Never do they develop the scales that armor-plate lizards and their kin do.

Some call the efts we see in the Adirondacks “red efts,” but I’ve never liked the name. To my eyes, they’re orange. Efts are the terrestrial stage of the red-spotted newt, which in turn is a subspecies of the widespread eastern newt. Newts belong to a family of tailed amphibians called the salamandrids. Most salamandrids live in Asia, Africa, and Europe, so we’re lucky that a single species has found its way inside the park’s Blue Line.

The typical red-spotted newt life story runs like this. In freshwater, a newt bursts out of an egg and begins life as a larva. A larval newt looks like a tadpole, except that a frill of gills sprouts from each side of its head. The larva eats animals smaller than itself—insect nymphs, amphipods, snails, tiny clams, and more. The larval period typically lasts between two and five months. During the last weeks of this stage, buds on the flanks sprout into four legs, lungs form, and the skin turns orange with tiny red spots encircled by thin black lines. As soon as it’s ready, the former larva—now a footloose juvenile or eft—marches onto dry land.

That’s the typical story, at any rate. Scientists working in various parts of the newt’s range find that some animals never quite outgrow the larval stage. These retain gills and a tadpole-like underwater lifestyle as adults.

Once a larva becomes an eft, it will probably tread the Adirondack woods for four or five years. Seven years is not unheard of. It will emerge from cover mainly in wet, cloudy weather. At these times, the risk of losing moisture through its porous amphibian skin is at a minimum and dangerous ultraviolet radiation is reduced.

Most salamanders rarely venture abroad in daylight, but eastern newt efts are different. Their skin produces a potent neurotoxin. How venomous are they? Don’t swallow one to find out. The scientific literature equivocates. On one hand, there’s evidence that the neurotoxin is nasty enough to sicken birds, which probably goes a long way toward explaining how efts get away with the risky behavior of traveling overland in daytime. On the other, there’s an account of a Catskill Boy Scout duped in the 1940s into eating a sandwich containing several efts. He survived the experience without so much as a bellyache. Still, be careful. Trout have been known to die after downing red-spotted newt efts, and the related western newt, found from the Alaskan panhandle to San Francisco Bay, is certifiably dangerous. One young man, egged on by ignorant peers, swallowed a single newt and died not long afterward.

Efts, typically only a few inches long, prowl the forest floor as efficient predators. They prey on a wide range of invertebrates, including spiders, mites, maggots, and springtails. When the weather turns dry, they strop prowling and hide under fallen leaves until rain and humidity return.

Eventually, hormonal changes inside the eft tell it the time has come to grow up and spawn a family. It migrates back to the brook or pond that gave rise to it, and there, underwater or on adjacent dry land, the salamander undergoes anatomical changes that will make it an adult.

Adult red-spotted newts look nothing like the efts they once were. Kids catch them by the bucketful in summer. Unless the children and their parents are unusually savvy, few realize the connection between the orange efts they’ve seen on hiking trips and the speckled olive-green adults they find at the beach.

The typical adult has long ago lost its gills, so it must swim to the surface now and again to fill its lungs with air. The tail is broadly flattened in a vertical plane, making it an efficient rudder and propeller in water. When you catch newts in the spring and summer, you can usually tell the gals from the guys. Females have pale, delicate legs and feet while the males develop black tips on their toes and black scabby ridges on their thighs. These help males hang onto females while they’re breeding.

Newt romance takes two forms. Either the male dazzles the female with a quick dance and puts her in a passionate mood, or he latches onto her in a posture called amplexus and clings for hours until he’s convinced she’ll mother his offspring. In both cases, fertilization takes place internally but without coitus. Males lay down globs of gelatin-covered sperm, and females, if they’re so inclined, pluck them up with the lips of their cloacae.

Acid rain, ozone pollution, and an introduced fungal disease threaten amphibian populations in other places, and it’s possible they’re affecting Adirondack newts. Still, the sight of efts wandering on rainy days remains a common experience for hikers here.

3. YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS ABOUT THE HOGNOSE SNAKE

When it comes to the eastern hognose snake, a reptile well known in New York State’s Hudson and Delaware River valleys but just discovered living inside the Adirondack Park, you must remember this: a hiss is just a hiss.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

No timber rattlesnake or copperhead can rival the hognose snake’s display of menace and ferocity. Frighten one of these cowardly reptilian lions in a field or forest, and it will do its serpentine best to frighten you in toto. The snake, which reaches thirty inches in length if it’s a particularly big one, may charge, mouth gaping, hissing viciously. Its broad head and upper body will likely rear up and flatten to form a sinister, cobra-like hood. If pressed further, the snake stops bluffing and strikes.

When it does, odds are its mouth will be clamped shut. Hognose snake bites are rare, although I was nipped by a hatchling once. Fortunately, the venom of a hognose is mild and seems to be dangerous to toads but not humans. The teeth that deliver it are located deep in the reptile’s mouth. There they anesthetize toads and deflate them, too. Toads generally inflate when scared, which I suppose to prospective predators makes them appear intimidating to swallow.

If you’re a skilled naturalist and herpetologist, like Kenny Barnett, who learned of an Adirondack Park hognose snake found near Lake Luzerne and reported it to the DEC, you may grasp the harmless bluffer around its plump midsection and give it a closer look. Barnett knows the hognose won’t hurt him, and that he, rather than the snake, poses the greater threat.

Barnett, as it happens, wasn’t the actual finder of the inside-the-Blue-Line hognose. Corbin Gosier, a reptile enthusiast from Amsterdam, gets the credit. But it was Barnett who, running into Gosier at a wildlife education program, heard of the discovery and knew it for something exciting. “The eastern hognose snake is a new vertebrate for the park, which is sort of a big deal,” Barnett told me during a three-way conference call.

Gosier contributed his part of the story. “I was leading a nature walk and knew enough about hognoses to be sure that’s what I’d found,” he said. “But I didn’t realize it was so important. That summer [2000], any time I’d look for her, she’d be there. I never captured the snake or harassed it.” Like all snakes, hognoses have no external sex organs, but Gosier decided the animal in question was likely a female based on its body shape. Females tend to be plump from head to cloaca (an all-purpose opening through which snakes excrete, egest, and breed), then taper sharply to form a short tail. Males tend to taper gradually.

Had Gosier tried picking up the reptile, it would perhaps have performed the hognose’s standard second act: rolling on its back. In the usual run of things, the mouth hangs open, the forked tongue hangs limp, sometimes food comes up, and blood oozes from the palate. A witch with a farmhouse on her head could not look more sincerely dead. Roll a hognose in this state over on its belly, and it flips on its back again. The snake seems to believe that to appear convincingly moribund, it must lie belly-up.

While eastern hognose snakes are new (or at least newly discovered by herpetologists) in the Adirondacks, they’ve long been known to occur throughout much of North America east of the Rockies. Their range brings them from southern New England to South Dakota, and southward to Texas, the Gulf Coast, and Florida. They survive chiefly on toads and live almost entirely in sandy places. Sand is the medium in which females lay their four to sixty or more eggs.

According to Barnett, the sandy habitat in which the Lake Luzerne hognoses occur lies within a zone of glacial outwash that stretches from the Palmertown area in Moreau west and north along the Hudson to Lake Luzerne. In Corinth, which lies within this area, Barnett has found hognoses living just outside, but within a mile of, the park boundary.

While on one hand Barnett and Corbin view the hognose snake as a “new” reptile for the Adirondack Park, they readily concede that locals in Lake Luzerne have long recognized its presence. There the serpent is known by a widely applied popular name, “puff adder.” Puffrefers to the hognose’s habit of inflating itself to deter assaults from predators such as foxes, raccoons, and humans. Adder comes from the snake’s vague and coincidental resemblance to the venomous adders of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Garnett told me he was eager to learn of other Adirondack populations, if any exist. He advised keeping an eye out for any stocky serpent that tends to flatten or fill itself with air when frightened. Hognoses come in a range of color patterns, including all-black. Most bear prominent dark markings on a tan, cream, or pale orange background. If you get close, you can look for the trademark turned-up nose. It’s not really swinish, but it’s important. The snout helps the hognose carve burrows in sand and gravel.

4. THE “PILOT” BLACKSNAKE

The biggest Adirondack snake, at least the longest, commonly reaches six feet in length. It’s the eastern ratsnake, formerly known as the black ratsnake, and before that widely called the pilot blacksnake, or pilot snake. And contrary to what my spell checker tells me, ratsnake is spelled by those who know it best as a single word.

Eastern ratsnakes don’t actually lead, or pilot, rattlesnakes and copperheads to their dens as was long believed. Yet they do often snuggle up for winter in company with venomous relations and with each other. Congregations occur in rocky, passive-solar-heated, south-facing exposures of fractured bedrock or talus.

The most impressive eastern ratsnake I’ve met firsthand, a nearly seven-footer, had shaped itself to the jamb of a sliding glass door. A colleague had pointed out a piece of black rubber molding that was hanging loose. I quickly realized two things: the door had no black rubber molding, and the molding was crawling away. It was a busy day at the nature museum where the reptile had turned up, and fearing the snake might suffer injury at the hands of someone hostile to snakes, I picked the ratsnake up and carried it away. Almost instantly, the snake relaxed in my hands. I held it without restraint as if the animal was a pet. The snake, meanwhile, returned my kindness by being docile, as well-treated snakes often do.

If you get a close look at an eastern ratsnake, which in the Adirondack Mountains is likely to happen only in the southeastern reaches of the park near Lake George, you may notice several things. For one, the scales are shiny, unless the snake is preparing to shed its skin. By contrast, the scales of the eastern racer, also black and limited mainly to the warmer southern half of New York State, have a dull, matte finish. A low but distinctive ridge runs down the middle of each ratsnake scale. These are called keels. They roughen the snake’s skin and help it grip and climb.

Another ratsnake feature that may catch your attention is the shape of the animal’s body in cross-section. Many snakes are at least somewhat round on this score, but ratsnakes are breadloaf-shaped. This is to say, a ratsnake is flat on the bottom and round on the top. The angles where bottom meets sides help a ratsnake push against irregularities in tree bark, expediting its journeys up trunks and into branches. I once released a four-foot-long wild ratsnake at the base of a healthy, smooth-barked American beech. I wanted to see if the snake could climb it. The reptile did so handily—so to speak.

Ratsnakes eat rats if they’re available, but in the wild, the reptiles might better be called “bird snakes” or “squirrel snakes.” Excellent climbers with hearty appetites, they can hardly be blamed for sampling edible treats available above the ground. Ratsnakes eat a variety of adult and baby birds, squirrels, and bats. Being constrictors, ratsnakes take on a potentially dangerous prey item such as a chipmunk, which has sharp teeth and claws, by looping a few coils around it and suffocating the animal first.

I once witnessed an eastern ratsnake cleaning out the nest of one of my favorite birds. Walking in the woods one day, I heard a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks making a fuss as they flew in and out of the leafy branches of a beech tree. I sized up the tree and decided I could climb it. Up I went, eager to see the grosbeak nest that was surely somewhere above me. What I found twenty feet above the forest floor disturbed me, but only at first. A shiny black eastern ratsnake was hanging from a branch above the grosbeak nest. Several lumps bulged in the reptile’s torso, and from its mouth, inert and likely dead, dangled the last of the grosbeak nestlings. Meanwhile mother and father grosbeak hopped about the surrounding branches, making loud chips. With their formidable bills the birds might have done the snake harm or at least driven it off, but apparently they didn’t dare.

When I tell the story of the grosbeak nest, some listeners are appalled. The thought of a snake devouring baby birds horrifies them. They ask: What action did I take?

I took none. It was too late for the baby grosbeaks. If I’d arrived earlier, I’d still have done nothing. Rose-breasted grosbeaks and eastern ratsnakes have flourished beside each other in the woods for untold thousands of years. Each is a predator. The grosbeak raises its young on insects and plants striving to nurture and protect their own progeny, and the ratsnake cruises the landscape, climbs, hunts, and produces clutches of its own eggs, fueled on a diet of fellow organisms, too. Truth be told, the hot-blooded, or homeothermic, bird takes far more lives than the cold-blooded, or poikilothermic, snake. A ratsnake spend hours at a time coiled on the south sides of trees, deriving much of the energy it requires to live its life not from murder but from sunshine.

And, of course, in other situations birds often win. Hawks, owls, herons, crows, ravens, and jays consume snakes, especially baby ones, as often as they can find them. And snakes often fail to find what they seek. Once I watched an eastern ratsnake crawl back and forth in the vicinity of the ground nest of a pair of ovenbirds. The snake was so methodical in its hunt that you would have imagined it was following a GPS grid. Both ovenbird adults uttered loud chips and feigned broken wings to lure the would-be plunderer away. In the end, they succeeded. The ratsnake slid off, out of luck.

5. SHAKE, RATTLE, AND CRAWL

Linger in the Adirondacks, and you’ll eventually hear about timber rattlesnakes. Each spring, these fearsome but peace-loving reptiles fan out from frost-proof dens in the heights above Lake George and Lake Champlain to feed and breed. At summer’s end, cool lengthening nights drive the serpents back to the holes they crawled out of.

Rattlesnakes in the Deep South stay active year-round, but up here on the Empire State’s northern frontier, four months of motion alternate with eight months of deathlike slumber. By human measure, theirs is a good life. There are no property taxes to pay. Groceries are free. Loud noises are rarely a problem. Rattlers specialize in hearing low-frequency sounds such as the footfalls of their prey and big, non-prey species they’d prefer not to meet. Scientists tell us that the buzzing of their own rattles lies beyond the range of their audition.

What is it like to meet a timber rattler in the wild? The event is one you’ll remember.

My own first contact with Crotalus horridus horridus (“Crotalus” means “rattle”—you figure out the rest) nearly made me faint. It was a warm day in spring. A herpetologist friend had brought me to a den site, the location of which will remain a secret. Picking our way up a rocky slope, we scrutinized the terrain underfoot. We found no snakes at first. Then, on a sunny ledge, we spied a big rattler basking.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The snake was as thick around as a lumberjack’s forearm, with a tail that tapered not gradually but abruptly. A half dozen or so translucent amber rattles clustered at the tip. The skin looked as rough as a carpenter’s rasp, and it shaded from brown to black. The head was notably thicker than the neck and handsomely sculpted. We noted features: eyes with vertical pupils, a forked tongue darting in and out, and heat-sensitive pits between the eyes and nostrils. Rattlers and other pit vipers use the pits, which are actually infrared-sensing organs, to track prey and aim strikes. Snakes “smell” chiefly with tongues that collect airborne scents and deliver them to a sensory organ on the roof of the mouth.

Turning to leave, my friend Steve and I suddenly perceived more rattlers around us. A juvenile not much longer than a pencil stretched out along another piece of ledge, and in the leaf litter much closer, we spied two big adults. I have never tiptoed through a minefield, but the feeling must be similar. One cautious step at a time, we advanced through talus and crackling leaves, knowing a wrong step might cost us a leg. None of the snakes rattled. Perhaps they were too cold.

On another occasion in a different place, Debbie and I, not yet married, had gone birdwatching. It was the kind of morning that promises reptiles. A chilly night had yielded to bright sunshine. The air still nipped, but the sun warmed our backs and faces. It warmed rocks, too. Cold blooded animals (“poikilotherms,” scientists call them) make use of warm rocks and ledges to raise their body temperatures. They don’t like being cold any more than we do.

“Do you realize you just stepped over a snake?” said Debbie.

I didn’t. But I was curious. What sort of snake? She didn’t know. A big one, she said. How big? I’d have to see for myself. Rather than turn directly back, I circled. It’s a good thing I did.

Egad! There, coiled in striking position, lay a timber rattlesnake of considerable size. (Later, when it crawled away, we estimated its length at about four feet.) Grasslike sedge leaves hung like bangs over the reptile, almost completely concealing it. This explained how I was able to step within inches of its head and fangs and not see it. I gulped. The place was remote. If I’d been bitten, Debbie would have had to run two or three miles to the nearest road and flag down a passing car for help. Timber rattler bites are rarely fatal, but the pain would have been awful, and I could have lost a foot or leg.

On another memorable day, before rattlers were granted legal protection in New York, a friend showed up at my door with a gift. It was a baby timber rattler, fresh from a den and about the length of a ruler. I kept that snake and became fond of it. On a diet of mice it more than doubled its length and girth. [Note: taking timber rattlers from the wild is illegal today, not to mention dangerous. I had training in handling venomous reptiles, and I was also young and foolish.]

Never aggressive, my foster reptile grew frisky. It often fell off the stick I used to relocate it during cage-cleanings. Each time I had no choice but to pin it gently to the floor and pick it up with my hands.

A year later, I released the rattlesnake beside the den where it was born. With luck, it’s still out there, still cruising the woods for rodents, shrews, rabbits, birds and whatever else strikes its fancy.

6. THE LURID SEX LIFE OF THE SUCKER

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a jester calls the savage Caliban a “deboshed [debauched] fish.” A Puritan might say the same of our common white sucker. During an orgiastic week or two in springtime, this Adirondack bottom feeder carries on in ways that would leave a Puritan appalled.

Spy a white sucker swimming in the shallow waters of a pond, lake, or river, and you’ll notice its peculiar downward-facing lips and mouth and broad coarse scales. Take a sucker off a hook, and you may recoil from its slimy skin. The sucker is the Anti-Trout. It’s easy to haul in, but no one wants it. The men and women who fish for bass and brook trout throw suckers back. Even kids have no use for them. Most who try eating suckers find the flesh tasteless and pasty and don’t repeat the mistake.

Despite all this, Henry David Thoreau came near worshipping the sucker. He conceded that when cooked, suckers taste “like boiled brown paper.” Still, the naturalist wrote a paean to them in his journal:

The sight of the sucker floating on the meadow at this season [spring] affects me singularly, as if it were a fabulous or mythological fish. It reminds me of pictures of dolphins or of Proteus. I see it for what it is,—not an actual terrene fish, but the fair symbol of a divine idea, the design of an artist.

Thoreau wasn’t done. He continued:

Its color and form, its gills and fins and scales, are perfectly beautiful, because they completely express to my mind what they were intended to express. . . . Such a form as is sculptured on ancient monuments and will be to the end of time. . . .

Thoreau was laying it on a bit thick; at least so I thought until one afternoon in spring about thirty-five years ago.

I was walking beside a pond on a crisp May morning when swirling shapes in the water caught my eye. Suckers! There were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, moving to and fro in glittering swarms.

Nearby, a stream swollen by a heavy rain poured over a gravel bar and emptied into the pond. Directly above the gravel, three fish swam closely together, almost touching, nosing into the current. They were big suckers, each stretching about fifteen inches from their Angelina Jolie lips to their graceful divided tails.

As if in a choreographed dance, the three fish edged closer and closer to each other. Each time one surged forward, a wave of energy raced down its body, beginning at the head, sweeping through the midsection, and culminating in a flourish of the tail. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. After a dozen or so seconds, the flanks of the fish touched, their bodies perfectly aligned.

What happened next nearly made my eyes pop out. The suckers thrashed violently while somehow managing to stay tight and parallel. As they shook, their silvery flanks—I wouldn’t believe this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes—turned fiery red. Simultaneously, their green eyes caught fire and seemed to bulge from their heads. Minutes later, I wondered if I’d hallucinated the whole thing. My doubt continued until I tracked down a 1920 study of sucker mating habits by a zoologist at the University of Michigan.

Jacob Reighard described a ménage-à-trois like the one I had seen. The sucker in the middle was a female, he said, and the flanking ones were males. As the three fish shook, the males dispensed their milt, or sperm. At the same time, Reighard explained, the female released her eggs.

Feeling like a voyeur, I, like Reighard, had stood captivated as the suckers consummated their courtship again and again. Never had I seen a reproductive ritual in the animal world to match this one. The drumming of a male ruffed grouse, watched from inside a blind at close range, offers high drama, yet it’s tame beside the show that was staged in front of me by suckers. Ichthyologists report female suckers mating with up to ten males at a time.

The upshot of it all is that Mother Sucker spews as many as 40,000 eggs in a single unloading. With luck, there’s plenty of sperm on hand to move in and fertilize them.

P. T. Barnum, who spent holidays in the Adirondacks at Paul Smith’s Hotel, famously claimed “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He was right in a general sense. Five to ten days after they come into the world in a blaze of eroticism, sucker eggs that have not been slurped up like tapioca by newts and other predators hatch rapidly and by the thousands.

Sucker hatchlings, or fry, nibble on surface scum. In so doing they consume bacteria, protozoa, rotifers, insects, algae, and more. On this robust diet little suckers grow to be big suckers. Adults can reach twenty-five inches. Males grow larger than females.

What good is a sucker? The fish lead fruitful lives, play important roles in recycling nutrients in their home waters, and contribute their flaccid flesh to the diets of trout, bass, otters, osprey, mergansers, and other Adirondack neighbors. You don’t have to be as worshipful as Thoreau to appreciate them. For their theatrical mating displays alone, they’re worth getting to know.

7. A TALE OF TWO FISH

There are two fish in Adirondack waters, both toothy and predatory, that if they were larger and we were smaller, might pose a risk to swimming children. Both eat, at least on occasion, muskrats. Ducklings and goslings are on the menu, too, as are mice, shrews, frogs, salamanders, crayfish, and lots of fish, small, medium, and large.

The lesser of these monsters of the deep, and of shallows, too, is the northern pike, Esox lucius. My Adirondack grandfather, who taught me to fish for these barracuda-like creatures, called them not “pike” but “northerns.” As nicknames go, “northern” is a good one. The range of the fish sits around the upper, boreal reaches of the planet like a wreath. Northerns occur naturally in the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Siberia, and in Spain and northern Italy, too.

A big brook trout might weigh ten pounds or, in an extreme case, fourteen. The record North American northern, caught on hook and line in Great Sacandaga Lake in the southern Adirondacks, weighed a tad over forty-six pounds. That’s a lot of fish.

People who catch pike often release them. The flesh is bony and the taste, to my palate, forgettable. My grandparents, foragers by nature and by economic necessity, generally ate everything that tugged on their lines. My grandfather skinned and gutted the northerns they caught, and my grandmother drizzled on tomato sauce and baked them. Today, I’d hesitate to eat a pike. Being fish-eating fish, and as creatures that live long lives (twenty years or more is possible), they accumulate methylmercury and other toxins carried by clouds to Adirondack waters from smokestacks in the Midwest. Such pollutants are concentrated as they work their way up the food chain. The flesh of fish-eating fish such as northern pike, walleyes, and yellow perch often contain high levels.

You recognize a northern by its long, sleek body (somewhat like a “pike,” or spear) and by light-colored spots (they might be yellow or white) set against a green background. On northerns, the cheeks, the patches of skin immediately behind each eye, are covered with scales. The cheeks of the muskellunge, the northern’s bigger, more formidable cousin, bear scales only on the upper half.

Northern pike prowl waters throughout the Adirondack Park. The Saranac Lakes abound in them, and so do lakes to the south such as Long Lake, Indian Lake, and Great Sacandaga. Those who fish for them catch them on spinners, plugs, worms, rubber worms, and live bait. The first big pike I ever caught, back in the late 1960s, grabbed a live frog. It took the amphibian deep and far. By the time I hauled it within reach of my grandfather’s net, I was exhilarated and exhausted.

Big as northerns can be, the real freshwater monsters of northern New York are muskellunge, or muskies, Esox masquinongy. Lake Champlain, bordering the Park on the eastern side, has a population of unknown size, and they also occur in the St. Lawrence and its tributaries, including rivers such as the Oswegatchie that rise inside the Adirondack Park. The exact status of the world’s largest pike in our waters is uncertain partly because the fish, for all its ferocity, is notoriously challenging to catch.

The name muskellunge suggests the powerful, swift-moving predator’s habit of lunging for prey. Its etymology is uncertain. Muskellunge may be a corruption of an Ojibway or Chippewa name for the fish or be derived from the French masque allonge, meaning long-faced. Another possibility is that the French name was adopted by American Indians and from one of their languages devolved into English.

A muskie can grow to five feet or more in length and weigh over sixty pounds. It begins life as an egg, one of 120,000 on average laid by a mother muskie in water between 49 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit. (Northern pike spawn in slightly cooler water and breed earlier.) Muskie fry feed on microscopic zooplankton. Growing quickly, they typically measure about a foot from snout to notch of tail by the end of their first summer.

Fishermen sometimes mistake tiger muskies for real muskies. The tiger is a hybrid of the muskellunge and the northern pike, one that occurs naturally but uncommonly. Most tiger muskies result from intentional crossbreeding in fish hatcheries. Stocked tiger muskie populations inhabit Horseshoe Lake, Buck Pond, Lake Durant, and Third Lake in the Fulton Chain. Hybrids have bold, tigerlike stripes bridging green backs. Full-blooded muskies typically lack bars, although sometimes there are faint ones.

Muskie fishing guide Don Lucas took my daughter Tasman and me muskie fishing on the St. Lawrence last summer. Captain Don had great stories to tell. He described seeing a muskrat perched on a fallen tree at the water’s edge. A big muskie cruised up to the rodent and grabbed it. A mouthful even for a muskie, the muskrat struggled but did not escape.

Meet your first muskie or pike up close, and you’ll never forget it. Circa 1962, at about age five, I was out in a boat on Adirondack Lake, near Indian Lake, when my grandfather hooked a big northern. With a pole bent nearly in half and the drag of his reel screaming, he cranked the fish into a waiting net. I remember being very small, and the fish being very big. It thrashed violently, showing glittering colors and a long, alligator-like mouth crammed full of teeth. The fish struck me as the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—and the most frightening, too.

8. OF WALL-EYES AND WALLEYES

There’s a fish, a deepwater fish, that avoids sunlight, prowling some but not all Adirondack lakes and rivers. You recognize it, if you haul one up, as a creature shaped much like the common yellow perch. But it’s larger and proportionately longer, and it either lacks the dark vertical bands that make a yellow perch easy to recognize, or it wears these bands faintly. This fish also has blotches, lots of them, all over its scaly body. Yet these don’t nail down the identification. To know for certain a fish is a walleye, you have to look for a white patch in the lower outer portion of the tail and a dark spot at the bottom rear of the forward dorsal fin. The perch has the dark spot, too, but not the white patch. And of course it doesn’t hurt to look at the eyes.

The peepers—the wall-eyes—that give this delicious but often toxin-tainted fish its name look milky and mucus-covered. It’s as if the walleye suffers from eye infections. The seemingly blanched eyes may be adaptive. Pale lightly pigmented eyes gather more light than boldly colored ones. Often after dark, the walleye navigates the murky shallows and poorly illuminated depths that are its habitat. Keen vision helps it avoid danger and find food.

Each walleye eye also contains a mirrorlike membrane called the tapetum lucidum. The tapetum reflects and helps amplify dim light. Dogs and deer possess the same membrane. It causes the eye-shine we glimpse when dogs and deer gaze into our headlights.

Why are the distinctive eyes of the fish called wall-eyes, rather than milky-eyes or white-eyes? No one can say with certainty. The general consensus is that wall-eyes have nothing to do with walls.

My 1971 compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers food for thought. The words wall-eyed and wall-eye, it says, go back centuries in English usage. The origins of the expression may lie in the Middle English (Geoffrey Chaucer’s English) term wawil-eyed. It means having eyes that are speckled. The derivation of wawil is unclear. Alternatively, wall-eye may derive from an old Scandinavian word, vagl in Danish and Norwegian and vagel in Swedish, meaning “beam of wood, roost, perch.” An eye irritated by a splinter of wood grows milky. Say vagl-eyed quickly. You come pretty close to wall-eyed.

Name aside, another open question about the walleye is whether it’s a longtime Adirondack native. Generally, the fish known to scientists as Sander vitreus was thought to occur in prehistoric times over a broad swath of glaciated lake and river country from the Appalachians to the Rockies. The St. Lawrence River links north-flowing Adirondack rivers with the upper Midwest, so it’s likely if not certain that the walleye got here on its own. Franklin Falls Flow, a dammed section of the Saranac River just down the road from our house, abounds in walleye. The fish have been stocked there, yet it’s possible native walleyes have prowled the neighborhood since the end of the last Ice Age.

March and April are breeding months for walleyes. Their romantic habits are well-studied. Shortly after ice-out, walleye males move into shallow, rushing water, usually with a gravel bottom. There, where oxygen content is high and ideal for the development of fertilized eggs, they await the arrival of females.

A gravid female walleye, her belly swollen with up to a half million or more eggs, rarely lacks for suitors. Males jostle for position beside her. When she deems the moment right, she thrashes violently, expelling eggs from her cloaca. Simultaneously, the male or males beside her shake in synchrony. The males’ aim is to shower milt (seminal fluid rich in sperm) over the eggs.

Some freshwater fish such as bullheads build nests and linger after breeding to defend and aerate their embryonic offspring. Not walleyes. The females depart quickly. The males often linger, perhaps aiming for further breeding opportunities, but they vacate the spawning grounds soon after egg-laying, too.

Meanwhile, fertilized walleye eggs develop where they’ve fallen into crevices or concealing muck. After two to two-and-a-half weeks, out burst tiny walleyes about a half-inch long. They grow swiftly. Walleye fry begin their careers as consumers of zooplankton. After forty to sixty days or so, they shift to a diet consisting largely of fish. Piscivory will largely sustain them the rest of their lives. Besides fish, walleye devour leeches, crayfish, insects, and other small aquatic animals.

A good-sized walleye measures twenty inches and weighs a pound or two. Really big ones can stretch twenty-five inches or more and weigh ten pounds.

In modern times, the curse of the walleye is its heavily fish-based diet. This inclines it to concentrate toxins through a process called bioaccumulation. Pollutants in our waters occur at moderate levels, but with each step up the food chain, they may be concentrated thousands of times. The walleye in Franklin Falls Flow have been found to contain high levels of toxic methylmercury, a compound that has its origins in inorganic mercury carried by clouds from coal-burning power plants in the Midwest. Methane-producing microorganisms in Adirondack muck bind methane to mercury. The resulting methylmercury races up the food chain. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation advises fishermen to avoid eating Franklin Falls walleyes. It’s a tragic situation. The lake looks pristine and the fish are much sought after and tasty. I’ve known people to catch and eat them in quantity. Yet the water is a coal mine of toxins, and walleyes are its canaries.

9. FINNED, FABULOUS, OBSCURE

Let’s begin with a sample of names: redbelly dace, tessellated darter, brook stickleback, and slimy sculpin. These fish and dozens of others you’ve probably never heard of go uncelebrated and ignored. They fail to attract the interest of fishermen and fisherwomen as brook trout and northern pike do. Even most naturalists, full of enthusiasm for the scarlet tanager and rose-breasted grosbeak, and for the bobcat and marten, hardly give little fish a thought. Still, these Adirondack natives deserve our attention and appreciation.

Why? For starters, they and their finned forebears have been swimming, feeding, and raising fry in our streams, rivers, and lakes since the last shards of the last Pleistocene glacier melted over the High Peaks. A great fuss is made, and rightfully so, about heritage strains of brook trout: little local populations with unique characteristics that diverged from each other over millennia of microevolution. But what about heritage strains of dace and darters? Our mountains abound in unique fish. No doubt the majority of them turn their tails on dry flies and jitterbugs.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Our piscine fauna remains largely obscure partly because fish in general, and little fish in particular, pose a challenge to observe and name. You can’t readily run out with binoculars and ogle them the way you can frogs, turtles, birds, and hairy things. Also, the fish we value tend to be edible ones, or ones that we can torment on the end of a line for entertainment before throwing them back. Fish that simply mind their own business, business they’ve been minding in the Adirondacks for 12,000 years or so, tend not to engage our interest.

Still, keep your eyes peeled around still and flowing waters. With a bit of effort, you can admire many of these fish. Let’s consider a few.

The tessellated darter is a small, frilly-looking, “Creature from the Black Lagoon” sort of beast, not colorful but handsomely patterned, which is what tessellated means. It’s a cousin of the yellow perch and walleye. Unlike them, the tessellated darter grows to only two inches or a bit more and never ends up in anyone’s frying pan. Its habitat is cool, oxygen-rich moving water with a sandy bottom. There it feeds on insects, small crustaceans, and dead stuff.

The redbelly dace is a small, dark minnow of streams, sphagnum-fringed lakes, and ponds. A pair of thin, dark stripes run down each side. Below the stripes in breeding males runs a bold scarlet band. The redbelly dace is a gorgeous little thing. If you’re watchful, you might spy one now and again. Maximum size is about two elegant inches.

Less glamorous than the redbelly but still jaunty-looking is the blacknose dace. This is a fish that manages to coexist with rapacious brook trout in cool headwaters and rushing mountain streams. It can be easy to spot in clear water against a dappled gravel bottom. A bold black stripe runs the fish’s length and extends to the front of the eye. The blacknose looks vaguely like the more widely distributed and less boldly striped longnose dace. This fish, inhabiting streams across most of northern North America, has a “nose” that extends well beyond the mouth; hence the name.

You gotta love the brook stickleback. It’s at best the length of your forefinger, drab, and comically homely, with a bad case of underbite. The dorsal and anal fins are set so far back they look misplaced, and the tail appears pasted on in afterthought. The fish’s surname comes from four to six stickles, or spikes. These ornament its back and impart the audacious, vaguely threatening look of a punk rocker. Never judge books by their covers. The brook stickleback is a fish to love. Its diet consists largely of mosquito larvae.

The slimy sculpin is the ugly duckling of our mini-fish. Just the name brings to mind the slippery and the grotesque. Lacking scales, and with a double dorsal fin and oversized pectorals, the slimy sculpin suggests a miniature Godzilla. As was the way with our own species in Eisenhower’s America, at least in the movies and in vintage TV situation comedies, males choose the spawning sites. To these humble nooks in lakes, streams, high mountain brooks, and springs, the females come to breed and feed.

If any of our lesser-known fish would win a beauty contest fins down, it’s the redbreast sunfish. My kids caught several of these one summer on the Raquette River. Renowned fishing guide Joe Hackett had taken us out for smallmouth bass. The kids reeled in a dozen or so of those, but the biggest attention-getters were thrown back. They were sunfish, suggestive of bluegills with turquoise facial stripes like the sunfish called pumpkinseeds. Yet these exhibited an eye-catching distinction: blazing red-orange breasts so luminous they would have looked at home on hummingbirds. Every once in a while I come across an animal so beautiful I feel privileged to stand in its presence. That’s how I felt as the kids pulled in five- and six-inch redbreast sunfish.

All right. Little fish are beautiful and interesting. But are they important? You bet. They eat and are eaten. This makes them part of a complex web that includes gamefish, crayfish, loons, eagles, and otters. Without them our precious waters would be impoverished in ways I hope to never fathom.

10. ANNELIDS I HAVE KNOWN

When the ice and snow of a long Adirondack winter begin to melt, life stirs in the water and in the soil. Birds begin to return, and early butter-flies such as the mourning cloak flutter. These catch the lion’s share of our attention. But it’s small things at our feet and underwater that make up the greater portion of the awakening biomass, a portion that includes a lively array of annelids.

For our purposes, an annelid is one of two things. It’s either a leech or an earthworm. Annelids are so named because they have rings, or annuli, circling their elongated squishy bodies. Not all the creatures informally called “worms” are ringed, but earthworms are. So are those dreaded but interesting citizens of Adirondack lakes, ponds, and rivers known as leeches.

Where my wife, teenagers, and I live along the Saranac River, we see two leeches that we feel confident identifying. The big ones, which grow to ten inches, tend to be olive-brown in color, with a row of red or orange spots running down the middle of the back. (Leeches, being generally flattened in shape, seem to have backs, which a typical earthworm, being cylindrical, does not.) Black spots run along the margins. The scientific name of this leech is Macrobdella decora. It has two common names: bloodsucker, which gets the point across, and North American medicinal leech, referring to the species’ on-again, off-again use in medicine.

Being of a mischievous nature, I once teased one of these big Sara-nac River leeches by touching it repeatedly. I’d pull my finger away, and it would lunge. While I tired of the game after a couple of minutes, the leech remained keen. I found its perseverance endearing and proposed to the rest of my household that we install the leech in a fish tank and keep it as a pet. To feed it, I suggested, we would take turns sticking an arm in the tank. There were no takers.

The other leech we see at our place I learned to identify during the course of preparing this story. It has no common name that I know of, or at least not one that’s printable. The scientific name is Placobdella parasitica. You may have seen it. This is the common dark leech (sometimes light brown, sometimes nearly black) that you notice clinging to Adirondack turtles. After learning about the annelid, I looked closely at photos I’d taken of female snapping turtles laying eggs. Egad! One poor mama snapper had a great big wad of the things clinging to her left hind leg.

Before changing the subject, let’s address the first question everyone asks about leeches. How do you get them off? Don’t use salt, vinegar, soap, a burning match, cigar, or cigarette. These provoke the parasite to regurgitate its gut contents into your bloodstream. Instead, scrape the leech off carefully with a fingernail. Leeches produce anticoagulants. Expect the bite to bleed. When a fish is bitten by a leech, the site of attachment bleeds modestly or copiously for an average of eight minutes after the leech falls off. For a human, the average time is seventy-three minutes! Shorten that time with pressure and a bandage.

If you want to avoid leeches while swimming in the Adirondacks, bear in mind that they tend to seek hosts after dark. Once, my wife, children and I were dipping and splashing at Little Green Pond. It was idyllic. At least it was until the sun ducked behind trees in the west. Dusk fell. Suddenly the water teemed with scores of leeches, undulating in search of hosts. We headed for the car.

As for those other annelids that emerge in spring, the earthworms, you may be sorry to know that everything you learned about them as a child is wrong. They are not, at least in northern North America, saints of the soil, churning and aerating and recycling to everyone’s benefit. Biologists tell us a different truth. Adirondack earthworms, with the possible exception of a small worm of the leaf litter, Bimastos rubidus, are believed to be non-native. Natives that may have occurred here in ancient times were pushed out by glaciers.

Every earthworm you find today is likely a native of Europe or Asia and an invasive pest, gobbling up leaf litter at a rate injurious to native plants and animals. Several years ago, I invited an earthworm study group led by Colgate University’s Tim McCay to visit our eighteen acres and see what it could find. The research protocols, used across the country, were simple. Penzeys mustard powder (Dr. McCay told me it must be Penzeys) is mixed with a fixed volume of water. The spicy water is then poured into the soil through a standardized wooden frame. Earthworms don’t like mustard. Up they wriggle.

Sampling several sites on our property, McCay and his students collected an impressive pile of worms. Later analysis on campus with microscopes determined them to represent five species. They were the rosy-tipped worm, Aporrectodea rosea; the angle worm, A. trapezoides; the octagonal-tail worm, Dendrobaena octaedra; the nightcrawler, Lumbricus terrestris; and the blue-gray worm, Octolasion cyaneum. Every one of these annelids is non-native. Being non-native myself, I was glad I had the chance to meet the little devils, even though, of course, I lament any mayhem they unleash in our soil.

11. THE STRANGE CASE OF THE FLOATING BRAINS

If you’re queasy around blood, guts, and detached body parts, the sight of this story’s subject might roil your stomach. For all appearances it’s a human brain, minus the encasing skull. It floats in the water of an Adirondack pond, lake, or lazy river, perhaps clinging to a stick or the piling of a dock or boardwalk. You’re out paddling or motoring in your boat, and there it is, a gelatinous spherical thing like nothing you’ve ever seen. Your first instinct may be to call the New York State Police.

But wait. Things are not what they seem. The “brain,” brownish or gray-green and fleshy, is not a brain at all. It’s a colony of tiny aquatic organisms. They’re known as bryozoans, or moss animals. “Bryo” comes from an old Greek word meaning moss, and “zoans” means animals.

Bryozoans are best known from the sea, where scuba divers brush past lots of them. Freshwater species also abound, but they’re little known to most of us. Some grow as a film on submerged plant stems and rocks. Others produce branching stemlike growths and hint at the form of seaweeds. The brain-like ones we see during the summer in Adirondack waters are known to scientists as Pectinatella magnifica. The name fits the bryozoans well. Their colonies are full of jelly like the stuff we make with pectin, and in a gruesome, squishy kind of way, they really are magnificent.

A University of Massachusetts at Amherst website offers another name. It calls Pectinatella “the Blob.”

The first time you see a Blob, you may find it otherworldly. There’s something alien, at least to us human landlubbers, about miniscule animals that cluster together like bees in a hive. Yet much of animal life on Earth consists of these sorts of creatures, as a diving holiday will teach you.

Probe samples taken from a Pectinatella colony with a microscope, as I did on our porch one summer, and you’ll find the moss animals in it not so different from our sort of organism as you might think. Sure, each has tentacles bristling with cilia, tentacles that help filter smaller organisms out of soupy, plankton-rich waters. And there are no hearts and lungs. Yet you and the soft-bodied invertebrate share much in common. The bryozoan has a mouth. It also has an esophagus, a stomach, a body cavity, a simple intestine, and an anus. There are females and males, eggs and sperm, and a very primordial form of romance.

In winter, Adirondack bryozoans, especially those that form colonies near the surface of waters, face a problem. Ice and snow cover all but the most turbulent of our streams, rivers, and lakes. What’s a moss animal to do?

Inside the colony during the warm months, the tiny animals produce structures called statoblasts. These develop like grapes on cords called funicula. Funicula link each bryozoan in a colony to the next. Within a statoblast lies a ball of cells that bide their time, waiting for opportunity or spring.

After the Pectinatella colony disintegrates in autumn, the statoblasts endure, the tender contents protected by two-parted shells. The shells are made of chitin—the same tough natural polymer, derived from glucose, that forms the hard outer coverings of insects, lobsters, and crayfish.

Come spring, the statoblast breaks open. Now the smudge of life inside develops into a lone, microscopic bryozoan. This creature feeds and buds and in a matter of weeks quickly multiplies itself into a colony. Then comes sex.

Inside the young Pectinatella colony, male and female cells generate eggs and sperm. The sperm can move from one colony to another and help scramble the bryozoans’ bloodlines, yielding a genetic diversity that in years and centuries to come will help the species to survive challenges.

Statoblasts are known to travel. Some survive passage through the digestive tracts of animals. Others may be carried by currents or wind-blown water droplets or transported on the feet of ducks, geese, and herons. Ducks and geese likely feed on Pectinatella, although I’ve never caught them in the act. But I have watched fish and eastern newts in their adult, aquatic stage nosing into goopy bryozoan colonies and nibbling.

Other Adirondack bryozoans include Cristella, which you can find by examining the stems and undersides of water lily pads in warm summer water, and Plumatella, which has a tubelike growth habit, is commonly brown in color, and can form enormous masses that look like underwater bushes, albeit ones covered by slime.

One summer a neighbor of mine, a full-time outdoorsman, came to me with photos he’d taken of a strange gelatinous mass he’d seen in an Adirondack pond. I was tempted to pull his leg, to tell him that the thing was, in fact, a lost brain or an alien life-form just arrived from outer space. Instead, I told him the truth. His mouth fell open. When it comes to bryozoans, reality outruns fiction.

12. NOT A SOGGY MOSS, NOT A WATERLOGGED LICHEN

Sometimes you see them, yet far more often you don’t. It’s a day in spring, summer, or fall. You’re out on a hike. Stepping across a stream, you look into a pool of cold, clear water. There with astonishment you spy not someone’s lost diamond ring, but something that looks like it belongs in a bathtub.

Yes, Virginia. There is such a thing as a freshwater sponge.

The most recent ones I’ve seen were carpeting rocks on the bottom of a shady brook in the McKenzie Mountain Wilderness. (I won’t give away the precise location for fear of the sponges gaining too much attention.) This was a brook that genuinely babbled, carrying on about nothing in particular. Its chilly, clean, oxygen-rich water tumbled over boulders and coursed through a descending series of pools.

My wife, Debbie, our two kids, and I were picking our way along the stony bank when I happened to glance down at the right moment. There I noted carpet samples, or something like them, clinging to submerged rocks. Light-brown, the little colonies were irregular in shape but vaguely round. They averaged about the diameter of the large coffee cup sitting before me as I write.

Wild Adirondack sponges? Indeed. Unless you’ve studied aquatic ecology, you may have thought until now that sponges belonged exclusively to the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. In fact, members of the great phylum Porifera (in plain English, sponges) range widely in fresh and salt waters all over the planet.

Sponges consist of tiny animals living together in dense cooperative communes. It takes an expert to identify them, alas, and experts are much harder to find than the sponges themselves. Adirondack sponges belong to a group known as the siliceous sponges. The species Debbie, Ned, Tassie, and I saw was likely Spongilla fragilis or S. lacustris. My vote goes to the former rather than the latter because the latter forms branches and thrives in bright sunshine. The sponge we saw did neither of these. It was absent downstream where abundant light warmed the water. According to Palmer and Fowler’s grand old Fieldbook of Natural History (McGraw-Hill, 1975), S. fragilis (it has no common name) lives in “standing or running water where there is no direct sunlight for long periods of time.”

Sponges, while obscure, are quintessential Adirondack creatures. They live highly seasonal lives in a place famed for its highly seasonal climate, and they’re nearly as old as the hills. Let’s hop on the life cycle of one in spring and see where it takes us.

In spring, a gemmule, a seed-like capsule that a sponge colony produces to export itself into the future, sticks to a likely stone. The gem-mule and lots of others like it developed on the surface of a sponge the preceding autumn.

Out of the gemmule pour cells that begin constructing a new colony. Their mission is to replace the sponge that produced the gemmule, the parent colony having fallen into disrepair or worse over the winter. Being a siliceous sponge, the cells create a rigid lattice of Tinkertoy-like structures called spicules. The spicules are made of hydrated silica. The marine sponges pressed into service in bathtubs, by contrast, make their spicules out of a material called spongin, which is soft and flexible.

Millimeter by millimeter, the growing colony spreads over its rocky anchor. In her 1939 Field Book of Animals in Winter, Ann Haven Morgan, a pioneering woman scientist and renowned professor of zoology at Mount Holyoke College in the early twentieth century, reports that freshwater sponge colonies may grow as large as ten or fifteen inches across and an inch thick in the middle. The biggest I’ve seen were half that size.

By summer, Adirondack sponges are producing eggs and sperm that in turn fuse and give rise to larvae. These swim and drift with currents. If things go well, a few lucky larvae affix to submerged objects. These found new colonies.

What do sponges do all day, and for that matter, all night? Pores of two types cover them, and into one set, they pull in water. This is accomplished partly via the action of tiny flagella inside the colony and also by simply letting the current press in from the stream. The flagella work a bit like lassos. They snare and engulf bacteria, other living organic matter, and microscopic bits of dead stuff. Mission accomplished, canals channel the water out of the sponge through another set of pores.

Just as sponges are predators on a microscopic scale, they, too, are preyed upon. J. Reese Voshell Jr.’s widely used A Guide to Common Freshwater Invertebrates of North America (McDonald and Woodward, 2002) ignores sponges almost entirely but does note that the larvae of “a few species of long-horned case makers” (a kind of caddisfly) prey on them, and certain species of water mite feed on sponges as parasites.

Keep your eyes peeled. With big storms washing away footbridges more often than in the past, we’re going to find ourselves rock-hopping brooks. Everything has an upside, I suppose. In the case of lost bridges, the upside might be more meetings with sponges.

PART FOUR

THESE BE BUGS

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1. BACK FROM THE DEAD

Every March, I step out the door some crisp but sunny afternoon and gasp at the sight of a butterfly. Snow covers the ground. The temperature is hardly above freezing. But there, resurrected in the sunshine, flutters proof that the dead may rise again.

Well, sort of. The big brown butterfly edged in cream and daubed with pastel blue did not really die. It winterized. Then, having braced itself physiologically, the delicate creature hunkered down under a curl of bark or loose shingle to wait out the winter.

This first butterfly of late winter and newborn spring is known as the mourning cloak, Nymphalis antiopa. Despite the dolorous name, it’s a happy sight on a March morning, an affirmation that we two-legged year-rounders, who with the help of woodstoves and oil furnaces outlast the long winter, are not alone in enduring.

The mourning cloak is not the only butterfly of the old year that lives to see the new. At our house in Bloomingdale, in the northwestern corner of Essex County, we also see Compton’s tortoiseshells (Nymphalis vaualbum) while solid ice still covers nearby Moose Pond. The Compton’s dazzles in the clear vernal sunshine, flashing white, orange, yellow, and black on wings with jagged borders.

How these butterflies survive winter, and function in the roller-coaster climate of March and April, is a neat trick. First of all, they follow the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared.” In autumn they pack on extra fat to keep their metabolic fires burning through the Big Chill. They also dehydrate themselves, not entirely, but enough to reduce the risk of ice crystals ripping apart fragile cells. Finally, mourning cloaks (and likely Compton’s tortoiseshells, too) fill themselves with a home-made antifreeze called glycerol. It’s the secret ingredient that helps the butterflies withstand Adirondack winter temperatures.

How low can they go? Mourning cloaks have been found to survive 80 below 0 Fahrenheit. That’s far chillier than the 46 below 0 recorded one memorable winter night at our house. Perhaps to this insect, the climate here is balmy.

If I want to see early butterflies and don’t find them casually, I keep my eye on sugar maples and birches. Twigs and limbs broken in winter exude sap on warm days. The sweet stuff provides the insects with a vital source of sustenance at a time when nectar is hard to come by. Soon, too, yellow-bellied sapsuckers come and riddle trees with holes. Where sap oozes, butterflies are likely to visit.

Mourning cloaks and Compton’s tortoiseshells appear early, but they’re generally not the first risen hibernators to soak up March and April sunshine. That distinction goes to a tiny, drab, speck of life, a kind of collembolan, or springtail, known as the snow flea.

Springtails go back 400 million years in the fossil record. They’re so primitive, so different from true fleas, and so like some of their primordial forbears that many scientists now place them not among insects, where they have traditionally found a home, but among the crustacea.

Whatever these rice-grain-sized creatures are, we see them by the bucketful, out sporting on the sun-warmed snow.

Sometimes I find snow fleas scattered like pepper from a shaker. Other times I discover them in great clumps, like clods of coal dust. If you keep an eye on a single springtail, you’ll catch it hopping. Springtails accomplish sudden, dramatic relocations with the help of a forked, locomotive organ called a furcula. Every time the furcula snaps into motion, the little beast goes hurtling a few inches through the air.

Much of the year, snow fleas would be better called soil fleas. They live in the leaf litter and the upper, organic layer of soil feeding on microscopic organisms smaller than themselves. When the Adirondack winter arrives, they cope with cold by producing antifreeze proteins, or AFPs. Springtail AFPs lower the freezing point of the animal’s vital tissues about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Under insulating snow, the upper soil rarely drops far below the freezing mark, and so, the springtail finds it a safe haven.

Scientists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario recently isolated an AFP from snow fleas that shows promise in human transplant surgery. Storing organs for later implantation is a tricky business. In the future, the AFP invented by the lowly snow flea may help hospitals store organs safely at low temperatures for long periods.

For years I puzzled over the means by which snow fleas move from the soil to the surface of snow that may lie several feet deep. Noting where I most often found snow fleas and tracking them back to patches of greatest concentration, I eventually concluded that they travel upward, at least for the most part, in narrow tunnels that form around tree trunks. Sapling trees, in particular, not only melt holes as sunshine warms them, but the bending and swaying of their supple trunks enlarges the corridors further. Up the snow fleas come, and out they go, onto the glittering snow.

2. OF MAYFLIES AND JUNE BUGS

The month of May has much to recommend it in the Adirondacks, the merry-making of mayflies included. As for June, there are June bugs. I’ve heard of March hares, but May and June are the only months, as far as I know, that lend their names to insects.

I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because, when we ponder the abundance of insects at this time of year, it’s far more pleasant to think of mayflies and June bugs than it is blackflies and mosquitoes. These handsome and ecologically important non-biters help distract us from their loathsome but equally significant cousins.

Mayflies, if you don’t know them, are primitive winged insects in the order Ephemeroptera. They are, in truth as well as in name, ephemeral. Mayfly adults do not feed. They have one thing on their narrowly focused minds: breeding. The males of most species form cloudlike assemblages over or near water. Females barge in, eggs are fertilized, and the mayfly life cycle launches itself on another lap around the calendar.

There are thousands of species of mayfly worldwide and scores in our region. The dates of emergence vary widely. So don’t be startled if you see a mayfly in July. Or September. Each species has its own prime time.

The eggs laid in water by expiring females hatch and develop into aquatic things called nymphs. A mayfly may remain in the nymph stage for months or years. If a member of a typical species, it lives quietly on the bottom of a stream, lake, or pond, walking on six delicate legs, feeding on plants, algae, and detritus. Gills run down either side of the abdomen. From the tail end extend two or three slender appendages.

As a nymph ages, it grows larger and passes through a series of molts. Eventually, as breeding time approaches, it climbs out of the water and bursts through its exoskeleton, unfolding wings. Still, it’s one stage short of being able to breed. At this point a mayfly is called a subimago. Someone who fly-fishes might call it a “dun.” Subimagos fall into the water in great quantities and are eaten by fish and amphibians.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Mayflies are the world’s only insects with two life-stages that fly. First comes the subimago, then the adult. This is the incarnation famed for being “ephemeral.” It emerges, flies, flirts, mates, and dies, sometimes in the space of a few minutes. Even long-lived mayflies persist at most only a few days. Mayflies have big eyes, the better to see each other with during the blink-or-you-miss-it season of romance. They have triangular wings, too, and slender taillike appendages, and an upwardly arching curve to their abdomens. You might take one for a homely damselfly doing yoga.

At our place along the Saranac River, our entomologist friends Luke Myers and Janet Mihuc have identified seven species of mayfly. More, perhaps many more, remain to be found.

As May segues to June, it’s high time to be looking for June bugs. Some naturalists would scold you for calling a June bug a June bug. They’re actually a kind of beetle. But the word bug, which in technical circles applies only to insects called Hemipterans, has a long history in the English language. That history includes anything that bugs you. Boogeyman springs from the same root.

To date, we’ve named eighteen species of beetle on our property but not a single species of June bug. Yet we’ve seen them. Sometimes when I’m cleaning windowsills on our porch or in our mudroom, I find their dead, dried bodies, which tend to look brown. Live ones often appear black or reddish brown. One of these days I’ll plop one of our June bugs under a microscope and try to identify it. There are hundreds of species. The number in the Adirondacks is unknown.

If you’ve ever turned over sod with a digging fork, you’ve probably found big white grubs curled in fetal positions among the roots of grasses. These are likely June bug larva. Grass roots are favorite foods of the grubs, and the grubs are favorite foods of skunks and robins. Skunks sometimes dig up patches of lawn infested by June bug grubs. No worries: while they’re performing a helpful service, they won’t send you a bill.

In addition to being stout and white, a June bug grub has a dark head. Along its length, brown spots mark the openings of the breathing pores, or spiracles. The grub feeds avidly and grows throughout the summer. In fall, it pupates. This is to say it curls up, stops moving, thickens its husk, and begins the process of reinventing itself. The following spring, in June or thereabouts, out comes a beetle.

Adult June bugs travel widely at night. You are most likely to see one after dark, flying around an outdoor light. Sometimes they turn up in great number.

Just as mayflies fly not just in May, June bugs turn up at other times, too, especially in May and July. There’s no simple way to identify them. The adults of most species measure in the vicinity of an inch and have thorny projections on their legs. One common eastern species, the ten-lined June beetle, is marked with jaunty light and dark stripes. It looks like it’s wearing a seersucker suit.

3. PAINTED LADIES IN THE ADIRONDACKS

Painted ladies abound in the Adirondacks during the warm months. Shocking? Perhaps not. I refer not to the “sweet painted ladies” Elton John sings of, but to two species of fetchingly patterned butterfly.

Painted ladies get less attention than monarch butterflies, but they’re just as pleasing to the eye. Our two are the American painted lady, or American lady, Vanessa virginiensis, and a cosmopolitan cousin, Vanessa cardui, known simply as “painted lady.”

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Painted ladies are small. The wingspans measure about two inches, and if you could get one to land on your fingertip, you wouldn’t notice the weight. Monarchs are about twice the size. Painted ladies are similar in proportion to the common red admiral, a close relation. All three have splashes of white toward the outer ends of the forward pair of wings. (Every butterfly has a pair of forewings and a pair of hindwings.)

At a glance, a painted lady of either species appears generally orange and black, with the white highlights just mentioned. The overall impression is of mottled coloration, very different from the sharply differentiated pattern of the monarch, which suggests stained glass. Painted ladies look as if someone daubed on their colors.

Butterfly enthusiasts have ways of quickly telling the two painted ladies apart. One trick is to look at the undersides of the wings when the butterfly folds them over its back. The American painted lady has two bold eyelike spots on the underside of each hindwing. In the same place on the underside of each painted lady, you find a group of small (usually four) blue “eyespots,” all in a line. Because painted ladies of both species tend to be highly active, especially when it’s warm, examining their fine points can be challenging. To get a good look at one, keep your distance, use binoculars if you have them, and work fast.

If the painted lady spreads its wings to bask in sunshine, you’ll enjoy a look at the upper wing surfaces. Look for a small white spot on an orange background set near the outer edge of each forewing. If this white-on-orange spot is there, your painted lady is the American. If it’s absent, you’re looking at its world-ranging cousin.

Which painted lady is more likely to be seen plying her trade (sipping nectar from flowers) in the Adirondacks? I had a guess, but rather than make it I consulted with three naturalists who know far more about butterflies than I do.

Sheila Rosenberg weighed in first. “American ladies are the more common of the two in our area,” she emailed. Sheila helps organize an annual Lake Placid butterfly count. She noted, “During the last ten years on the Lake Placid count, where I’m the compiler, we have had Americans three of those years and Painteds once.” She also remembered the summer of 2012, when painted ladies appeared in the Adirondacks in “vast numbers.” “I began seeing them everywhere,” she continued. “It was extraordinary.”

Why so many painted ladies here in 2012? Sue Grimm, well known in my neck of the woods as a longtime curator of the butterfly house at the Paul Smith’s Visitor Interpretive Center, speculated that many of the painted ladies we see are the result of people buying, raising, and releasing them. This, she explained, is a popular activity in schools and among homeschoolers. Sheila Rosenberg added that painted ladies are sometimes raised and released in great numbers at weddings.

Ezra Schwartzberg, friend, neighbor, and professional entomologist, brought my questions to a biologist colleague at the University of Alberta. Greg Breed, like Sheila Rosenberg, commented on “biblical numbers” of painted ladies in northern North America during the summer of 2012. According to Breed, our two painted ladies are “common to very common species, and during northward irruptions carrying large numbers of migrants [they] can become super-abundant.”

Whether schoolteachers, wedding parties, population swings, or environmental changes account for bumper crops every now and again is unclear. Maybe it’s a bit of each. Meanwhile, cosmopolitan painted ladies come and go in the Adirondacks. Some years I see them, and some years I don’t. The American painted lady appears more consistently. Both butterflies are migratory, but a fraction of American ladies may opt to overwinter.

Where exactly do our painted ladies go when they leave us in fall? Nobody knows exactly. There’s much about the lives of these colorful butterflies we have yet to learn.

At our home on the Saranac River, it is the American painted lady we see most. The first individuals appear in May, and they stay, or their successors stay, sipping nectar from wildflowers throughout the humid, leafy summer. When we see American painted ladies, we usually spy them on spreading dogbane, common milkweed, and vetch.

Favorite American lady caterpillar food plants include a wildflower known as pearly everlasting and another known as pussytoes. Someday I’ll get down on my hands and knees and hunt for the small, spiny caterpillars. They lash leaves together with silk to form tentlike structures, then do their dining indoors.

4. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A DEER FLY?

Around and around your head it loops as you hike through the great green Adirondack forest on a summer afternoon. If you’re woods-savvy, or if you’ve decked yourself out like Theodore Roosevelt in full safari regalia, your juicy, blood-laden scalp enjoys protection under a hat. If you’re bare-headed, beware. The enemy aircraft tracing circles around you is a deer fly. Recognize it by its boldly patterned wings. Persistence is its middle name.

Sooner or later you’ll lower your guard. Perhaps you’ve spied a warbler caroling on a maple limb or a porcupine dozing on a hemlock bough and want to lift binoculars and admire it. Your hands stop swatting. The fly zooms in. Seconds later razor-like mouthparts rip into sensitive skin and you scream something impolite.

If your attention is long diverted, the fly, a female member of the disagreeable Tabanid family that also includes horse flies, enjoys her meal. Part of her mouth is designed for surgery, another, a spongelike labium, for lapping up blood. The fly gets plenty of blood because at the same time she’s slicing into your scalp she’s dosing you with anticoagulant.

Lucky victims of the deer fly suffer nothing more than a little pain, a lot of annoyance, and a trifling loss of blood. Unlucky victims fare worse. Deer flies are known to carry the microorganisms that cause tularemia and Lyme disease. Whether they’re major vectors of transmission or not remains under scrutiny. Until the jury’s in, it’s sensible to avoid bites as best you can but not to be overly worried. I’ve been supplying blood to Adirondack deer flies since 1958, and in those forty-eight years, the worst consequence I’ve suffered is bad attitude.

Truth is, I hate deer flies. They’re handsome, as flies go, but can ruin otherwise sublime summer days. Here’s a typical story. One attacks you at the beginning of a hike. The miscreants like to bite high, so you hold out a hand, raise it over your head, let the deer fly alight, and lower the hand slowly. Smack! With satisfaction you feel fly flesh yielding to force, and the corpse falls to the ground. But triumph is fleeting. Instantly a second deer fly finds you, and a third, fourth, and fifth, and so on. The supply seems limitless. You leave a trail of death and curses until the rising heat and plummeting humidity of midday drive the monsters back to their hangouts under leaves.

Where I live in northwestern Essex County, New York, a two-hour drive south of the Canadian border, deer flies seem to be mainly a phenomenon of late June, July, and early August. Bad as they are, things could be worse. Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus, among other scourges, and they bite us on warm days April through November. Also, most deer fly bites can be prevented by the simple expedient of wearing a hat. Mosquitoes, on the other hand, will bite you just about anywhere, head to toe, and they drill through all but the thickest of fabrics.

Unfortunately for those of us who inhabit or visit the Adirondack Mountains in summer, the region is a deer fly paradise. The biting hordes reach their greatest abundance in moist woods drained by numerous streams, and this type of habitat abounds in every Adirondack township. Females often lay multiple clutches of eggs, generally with a hearty blood meal before each. Deer blood serves the purpose nicely (hence the name “deer fly”), but our relatively thin and hairless skin makes humans particularly attractive.

Mama deer fly lays her tiny, dark, cylindrical eggs in layered clusters. They’re generally deposited on the leaves of plants in or just above water. In a week, more or less, the eggs burst open. Out drop wormlike larvae, tapered at both ends and banded in the middle. The larvae burrow into mud, living there for the next one to three years on a diet of rotting leaves, worms, insects, snails, tiny crustaceans, and whatever else they can find.

When a deer fly larva is nearing two inches long and approaching adulthood, it wriggles into drier soil. There the larva pupates. Six to twelve days later it bursts out of the pupa case as a green-or-golden-eyed adult. The wings are strikingly patterned, either black on white or black on yellow, depending on the species. Males lift off in search of flower nectar, aphid honeydew, and oozing sap. Females find a good ambush spot, then wait for victims. Once you’re identified, the fly follows you until it’s either succeeded in drilling you or you’ve reduced it from three dimensions to two. My friend Mark Rooks, an avid cyclist, tells me that the speed required to outrun a deer fly is 14.5 mph. He’s half-joking, but his point is plain: you can’t outrun a deer fly.

From my experience, insect repellents such as DEET and citronella have only minimal effect in driving off deer flies. What’s a hiker or paddler to do? The first line of defense, as mentioned earlier, is a hat. The point bears repeating. The insect’s favorite square inch of the human anatomy is that tender and unprotected spot on the crown of the head from which scalp hairs diverge. Protect it, and you’re ahead of the game. When the flies are thick, I generally wear lightweight long-sleeve shirts and pants, even on hot days. When the enemy air force descends, I roll down my sleeves, flare up my collar, and largely ignore them.

For me, the gloomiest point of the year comes when I realize that summer will soon be over. Thank heaven, then, for the deer fly. A few savage bites on a glorious summer day will have me yearning for autumn.

5. INSECTS FROM HELL

For a thousand dollars, materials and labor, we hired a carpenter to replace the wire-mesh screens on our porch with state-of-the-art nylon netting. It was a brilliant idea. No-see-ums (tiny biting flies of the midge family Ceratopogonidae) are such a plague at our Adirondack dream house that on hot summer nights we cannot use our porch or have a window open unless lights are switched off a half hour beforehand. The new screening, said the salesman we bought it from at a lumberyard, was “no-see-um proof.”

Hard experience had driven us to the expenditure. The first summer in our house, my wife, Debbie, and I were working long hours rescuing the place from ruin. At the end of each day, we liked to treat ourselves to a cold beer or glass of chilled white wine on the porch. There we would relax, read, talk, and soak up the night wildlife chorus. I remember settling into a porch chair late one evening, reveling in a cool breeze and savoring the hooting of a barred owl and thinking I’d arrived somehow alive in heaven.

Then the no-see-ums moved in. If you prefer, call them punkies, biting midges, or, as my Adirondack grandfather used to address them, “miserable little bastards.” First in small numbers and then in hordes, they came from far and wide to fly blithely through old metal screens and feast on our blood. I’m not fussy about insects. When they’re driving companions of mine batty, I’m just beginning to get annoyed. But our home-grown no-see-ums, born and bred along the beautiful Saranac River, proved insufferable.

Debbie and I used to leave French doors to the porch open in those days, too. If we wanted to feel the breeze on a summer night and at the same time sit indoors and watch the eleven o’clock news, we had to do it in head nets. The nets worked, a little, yet straining beer through them soon grew old. We were finding it difficult to triumph over the mating urges of insects that from stem to stern measure only about a sixteenth of an inch.

Adirondack no-see-ums begin life as eggs laid up to several hundred at a time in moist soil or at the edges of ponds and streams. From the eggs emerge wormlike larvae. These feed on tiny soil organisms or dead things, depending on the species. The larvae grow rapidly, then mummify themselves as pupae.

Males burst from the pupal cases first and make their way to prospective hosts, which is to say, to our house or yours. Then come the prospective mothers. Many species mate in orgiastic swarms, swarms you can spy on a summer evening if the light comes from just the right angle. Afterward, the menfolk head off in search of a cool drink of nectar while their mates prowl for you and me.

“Females of one genus (Probezzia) are a bit like gory vampires,” reports Stephen A. Marshall in his magnificent and highly recommended Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity (Firefly Books, 2006). “The female flies into a male swarm, mates, then pierces her mate through the head and sucks out his brains (along with his other body contents.)” Charming! To be fair, Marshall also points out that we owe the existence of chocolate to a biting midge that pollinates the flowers of the cacao tree.

When an Adirondack no-see-um comes to dine, it alights, generally without you seeing it. Then it establishes a grip on your skin using its lower jaws, which are shaped like steak knives. Next the no-see-um scissors its way through your skin into capillaries that pulse with your blood. It daubs spittle into the wound, the saliva serving mainly as an anticoagulant, and your sap flows freely. The expectant mother fly sucks it up with her tongue.

In the tropics, biting midges are well-known carriers of parasitic worms with the ominous name Mansonella. These cause skin lesions in humans that can be dangerous if left untreated. Adirondack no-see-ums transmit no serious maladies to people, at least as far as we know. Still, cattle and deer may suffer. To ruminants domestic and wild the miserable little so-and-sos may transmit epizootic hemorrhagic disease and a condition called bluetongue, both of which can be fatal.

Once mated and fortified at your expense, the female no-see-um flies off to a wet place. There she lays a batch of eggs (she may produce up to seven batches in her lifetime) and sow the seeds of future torment.

The first night Debbie and I slipped out to the porch after the no-see-um netting went up, we expected to celebrate a triumph. As it happened, within an hour of sundown we were facing a painful truth. No-see-ums cruised through the expensive new netting like it wasn’t there, although their numbers seemed reduced. Now we could read for fifteen minutes before being driven indoors rather than fifteen seconds. That was progress. But on the very first night we learned that deer mice, which occur in staggering number where we live, chew gleefully through nylon screening even though they’d never bothered the metal screening it replaced. By bedtime, three golf-ball-sized holes gaped in the mesh. We fixed them the usual Adirondack way, with duct tape.

6. BUGS THAT SING AUTUMN ANTHEMS

While summer fades and autumn paints the Adirondacks red, orange, yellow, and bronze, the hills are alive with the sound of music. The sounds are not an encore of spring, when rhythm and melody pour from the throats of frogs and birds. In late summer and fall, the music mainly comes from insects.

This is the annual symphony of bugs, or, as an entomologist would put it, not of so-called true bugs but of insects of the orders Orthoptera and Homoptera. It reaches its crescendo in balmy early September and fades to silence in chilly October. The instruments are bits of wing and abdomen that rasp, rattle, and roll.

The most celebrated autumn percussionist in most of New York State, the common true katydid (Pterphylla camellifolia), is generally absent where I live in the northern Adirondacks, although once, on just a single night, we heard a few making exceptions of themselves near our house. Fall nights in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys throb with this grasshopper-like insect’s three syllable chant, KATE-ee-did.

We in the montane interior may lack common true katydids, but we’re rich in other katydids and their cousins. All these insects, along with grasshoppers and crickets, are classed as Orthopterans. Ortho means straight. We go to orthodontists to get crooked teeth straightened. Ptera means wing. Orthopterans have straight forewings.

There’s a sameness in appearance to members of this insect order that makes them simple to recognize. They tend to have small heads, extravagantly long legs, and wings that all but hide their thoraxes and abdomens.

Just as songbirds can be identified by their signature voices, the music-making insects can be named by the singular sounds they produce. Two species I’ve identified by ear at our place along the Saranac River are the sword-bearing conehead (Neoconocephalus ensiger), a kind of katydid, and the oblong-winged katydid (Amblycorphya oblongifolia).

Like most of their fellow Orthopterans, these insects generate torch songs by rubbing one body part against another. In the two species mentioned just above, the noise arises when a sharp edge at the base of one forewing scrapes a file-like abrasive patch on the other. As with birds, at least in part, noisemaking is largely a game of wooing females.

In late summer and early fall, I sit on our screened porch and take in the performance. Most of it comes by day, perhaps largely because nighttime temperatures begin to drop below the point where insects feel frisky.

The sword-bearing conehead (the name suggests a cross between Errol Flynn and a character in a Saturday Night Live skit) sounds like an automatic sprinkler. Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger, the authors and recordists behind the extraordinary book/CD package The Songs of Insects (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), render the call “tst-tst-tst-tst-tst-tst.” The oblong-winged katydid, a leggy chartreuse creature that looks like it’s wearing a tent on its back, produces a call Elliott and Hershberger render as “zeee-dik!” This insect chiefly inhabits weedy places. Our yard fits the bill.

What do sword-bearing coneheads and oblong-wings do when they’re not striking up the band? The question is a good one, but truth is, the literature runs light on details. They eat plants. Birds eat them. They listen to each other and presumably to predators with ears built into their forelegs. And in autumn, the insects mate, females lay eggs, and adults perish on frosty nights.

Also contributing to the buzz of late summer and autumn are cicadas. In the Adirondacks, at least three likely occur: the dog-day (Tibicen canicularis), the Canadian (Okanagana canadensis), and Say’s (Okanagana rimosa). Of these, I know only the dog-day. Its high, mechanical buzzing in trees represents one of the signature sounds of the season.

Cicadas look like giant leafhoppers. As Homopterans (meaning “wings the same”), that’s essentially what they are. Males, ferocious-looking but harmless, produce music with specialized abdominal noise-makers called tymbals. The abdomen serves as a resonating chamber. A few days ago I heard my first dog-day cicada of the year. It transported me back to the period in my life when September meant going back to school.

If you get lucky enough to see, rather than just hear, a dog-day cicada, it will catch your attention with its bulging eyes and keg-shaped body. Black veins form a grid over the wings, making them look like the work of a blacksmith. You seldom see the nymphs. They live underground and pierce roots with sap-sucking mouthparts. After a few years on the dark side of the forest floor, they burst into the light. The papery shed skins they leave behind can be easy to find.

Newly minted adults find each other and mate. Scarcely two weeks after emergence, they die. By then the females have injected their eggs into twigs, where they soon hatch. Nymphs emerge, feed briefly, drop to the ground, and burrow.

Sing, listen, mate, and die. For adult katydids and cicadas, that’s pretty much the whole story. This simple life works for them, and we get to enjoy the music.

7. CREATURES OF THE BLACK LAGOON

Down under your boat, down past the zone where water gives way to muck, live monsters, tiny but lethal to their miniature prey, creep and crawl through a pudding-like ooze. Oblivious to your presence high above, these creatures live important lives, existing for their own sakes and channeling energy up the food chain. Yet few Adirondack explorers know anything about them.

Or do we? Truth is, almost everyone knows the muck monsters during their high-flying adulthoods. We recognize dragonflies and damselflies and admire their bright colors. We note great hatches of mayflies cluttering the air over ponds, rivers, and lakes in the warm months. If we see a fishfly, dobsonfly, or stonefly, we probably don’t know what to call it, yet we recognize the insect as something apart from the ruck of pestiferous flying things that haunt our North Country outings. We know these creatures after all, yet only as those engines of sexual reproduction called “adults.”

For good reason the juvenile stages of these insects are unknown to all but a few of us. Of course that’s the case. Who scoops up wads of stinking muck and, for perverse entertainment if not for science, picks through it?

Well, I do. You might want to give it a try, too.

It helps to have a dip net, particularly one with fine mesh. These are available in better sporting goods stores and through biological supply houses. I also like to have two or three white plastic basins on hand. Half-fill these with water, drop in a dollop or two of muck fresh from the bottom of an Adirondack pond, lake, or stream, and start perusing. You might also want to make stone soup of your catch by adding submerged rocks.

Look closely, and voilà! The primordial soup turns out to be chunky.

The largest, most obvious creatures you catch are already familiar, so we won’t devote much space to them here. You may find tadpoles, salamander larvae (these are differentiated from tadpoles by feathery external gills that wave from the sides of their heads), eastern newts, baby bullheads (as fry these fish look like tadpoles with Fu Manchu whiskers), freshwater mussels, and crayfish. During their adolescences, eastern newts turn flaming orange and are called efts. They remain efts for two years or more, then turn the color of mud and return to life in the water.

Also mucking around in the velvety ooze are a variety of insect nymphs. Nymphs form the middle stage in three-parted insect life cycles (egg to nymph to adult) which leave out the pupal stage typical of insects such as butterflies and moths. Aquatic nymphs are sometimes called naiads.

Tease apart muck and you’ll likely find naiads of several types. Some may be chunky and look like tiny clawless crabs. These are juvenile dragonflies. Disturb one, and it rockets forward by ejecting water from its rectum. The gills that dragonfly nymphs use to extract dissolved oxygen from water cluster inside their rear ends.

Damselflies are cousins of dragonflies, but their nymphs appear markedly different. Look for a slender, six-legged creature with a triad of feathery appendages attached to the rear end. The appendages are external gills. They do the important work of extracting the infinitesimal amounts of oxygen dissolved in even the coldest, most oxygen-rich water. The air we breathe contains about 21 percent oxygen. The concentration of oxygen in pond and lake water in summertime may be less than one-thousandth of 1 percent. This goes a long way toward explaining while no large animal with prodigious oxygen requirements depends on gills for breathing.

Mayfly nymphs often inhabit the muck, too. Here they are consumed by larger nymphs and themselves feed on smaller ones. They tend to be less chunky than dragonfly nymphs but not as slender as damselflies. External gills fringe their flanks. After they burst out of their final nymphal skins and take to the air, mayflies undergo a final molt. After it, they’re ready for their life’s work: to breed, lay eggs (if they’re females), and die.

If the water you’re exploring is cool and flowing, you may also find stonefly nymphs. These often cling to rocks and plant stems. Their tails are two-parted. As adults, stoneflies are silent inconspicuous creatures, seen but never heard. They have veiny, translucent wings that fold flat over their backs. Antennae project almost straight out at the front.

The more you look at muck, the more you find in it. There are crustaceans called scuds, or side-swimmers, far smaller than crayfish; caddisfly nymphs that build portable tubelike homes out of bits of debris; leggy, centipede-like dobsonfly nymphs, or hellgrammites, that can deliver a shocking pinch; diving beetles; annelid worms; flatworms; leeches; and on and on. Put a thimble of Adirondack black gold under a microscope, and you’ll find it teeming with bacteria, protozoans, bits of algae, fungi, tiny crustaceans called copepods, water mites, springtails, and more.

Muck represents its own universe, teeming with galaxies of life. None of us will ever get all the way to the bottom of it, but if we’re curious, we can have fun trying.

8. A WHOLE LOT OF WALKING GOING ON

Been in a damp cellar lately? Looked for a salamander under a rotting log? Poked around a compost heap? If you’ve done any of these things, chances are good that you’ve spied a centipede. But wait. Could it have been a millipede? Given that one of the animals is venomous and the other harmless (unless you swallow it, which you’re unlikely to do), it’s important to know the difference.

Centipede means hundred-footed and millipede thousand-footed. While the names exaggerate, each animal is endowed with enough limbs to keep you counting for a while. Still, to tell the creatures apart, you don’t have to tally limbs. Simply consider the little monster’s gross anatomy.

Centipedes have long, wiggly legs that project outward from the body. In the case of the house centipede, the one that often turns up in cellars and slop sinks, some of the legs are longer than the body itself. There are thirty legs altogether. Millipedes, on the other hand, have even more legs. Our Adirondack representatives trundle around on a couple of hundred or so. Millipede limbs suggest bristles on a hair brush. They tend to be short compared to those of centipedes and lie hidden beneath the animal’s streamlined, segmented body.

Centipedes, scooting around chiefly after dark chasing prey, put their long legs to good use. They are miniature wolves of the forest floor, running down insects and other edible neighbors. Members of the invertebrate Class Chilopoda, centipedes are built something like their cousin spiders. All spiders are venomous, although very few are seriously harmful to humans. The same holds true for centipedes. They run, grab, bite, envenomate, and, as spiders do, suck out the liquefied innards of prey.

All my life, and I’ve been around a while, I’ve relocated centipedes from cellar sinks and examined ones I’ve found in Adirondack lean-tos and in damp shady spots in the woods. One has yet to bite me. Still, while I never hesitate to scoop a centipede into a container for a look and relocation, I’m cautious. Every time a big animal picks up a small animal, the small is justified in thinking itself threatened. Palmer and Fowler’s classic Fieldbook of Natural History, Second Edition (McGraw-Hill, 1975) reports that centipede bites “may be painful” and advises, “Treat by bathing in ammonia solution and retarding blood flow.” Far better, I think, to stick with Ben Franklin’s prescription: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Take comfort in the fact that any centipede you uncover, even if it bolts in your direction, likely has no intention to harm. You’re much too large to eat. Repelled by light, the creature simply wants to reach the nearest dark, damp place by the shortest possible route.

Once, on a rocky and remote island off the coast of New Zealand, I had the pleasure of camping on ground populated by a chilopod known in that country as the giant centipede, Cormocephalus rubriceps, or more dramatically (as the creature was first described by a biologist to me), the giant poisonous centipede. Happily, the animal, which is wonderfully frisky when disturbed and can grow to six inches or more, never joined me in my sleeping bag. Yet once, in the middle of a memorable night, a giant centipede entered the tent of the member of our research team most terrified of them. Screams awoke our group of ten. Several lurched to our feet and ran to help. We took in the sight of a big, strong man, six feet tall, shouting and running around in his underwear in utter terror. A big, curious centipede had entered his tent and paid him a visit. It did no harm and was gone by the time we arrived.

Millipedes? They’re a different story—utterly harmless, except for the toxic species. Even then, the chief risk comes from eating them. Millipedes represent the oldest known land animals on the planet. They constitute the invertebrate Class Diplopoda, which means double-footed. Each has two pairs of legs attached to most of the segments of its multi-parted bodies. Millipedes move slowly and look gentle.

Pick up a millipede, and it won’t bite. At least, that’s been my experience. If it does bite, I suspect you’ll hardly notice. I’ve handled hundreds bare-handed without a nip. Still, be careful. Once, when my daughter, Tasman, picked up an injured dragonfly and claimed it had bitten her, I shared in a knowing, fatherly voice a “fact” I’d been taught by naturalist mentors: that dragonflies can’t bite. They don’t have the mouths for it. To demonstrate for my daughter, I picked up the dragonfly. Instantly it bit me and I shook my hand to dislodge it. Millipedes aren’t dragonflies, yet a little caution is always a good thing.

Millipedes are not well studied. They seem to feed entirely, or chiefly, on plant matter. Generally they scavenge the dead, but there are times when some species may shift to the living roots of outdoor ornamental plants or make pests of themselves in greenhouses. A small minority of millipedes feeds on creatures such as insects and worms.

No one can say how many species of centipedes and millipedes race and plod across Adirondack landscapes. A comprehensive study of them has never been done. But two things are certain. There are staggering numbers of them, and they’ve been here a long, long time.

PART FIVE

GREEN THINGS AND NONE OF THE ABOVE

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1. SEX IN THE TREETOPS AND BUSHES

In winter, Adirondack landscapes look like black-and-white photographs. Only close inspection shows that some of the blacks are not blacks at all, but the dark greens of pines, spruces, firs, and hemlocks. Then comes March.

With the approach of the equinox on the 21st, a faint wash of pink spreads over hillsides and pools in swamps and valleys. What does it mean? For red maples, and for most other trees, the season of romance and sexual reproduction is about to begin.

Vast stretches of the Adirondack landscape turn pink because one of the most widespread of our trees, the red maple, is preparing to unfurl its flowers. The hard, waxy buds that protect the blossoms-to-be are colored red. During the winter, they’re too small to catch the eye, at least at a distance. But as spring approaches, things change. Water and growth hormones flow on mild days, and tender tissues within the buds begin to stir. The red buds swell. The larger they get, the more pink grow the hillsides—pink rather than red because the red of the buds blends with the pale gray of the twigs.

When red maple flowers finally burst out in my part of the Adirondacks in late March or early April, pink gives way to red and orange. The difference is a matter of gender. Most individual hardwood trees are bisexual, but red maples commonly produce female flowers on some trees and male flowers on others. You can actually drive down the Northway at 65 mph and sex red maples by their color. All parts of the female flower are Cabernet-Sauvignon-colored, which makes the feminine trees appear deep red. Male flowers bristle with yellow filaments and red anthers. The visual blending of yellow and red on male trees seen at a distance creates orange.

What’s actually happening up there? When sexually mature, the anthers of the male flowers release clouds of pollen into the air. The stuff drifts with air currents and slowly settles to earth. Odds are, the sticky stigmas of female red maple flowers will catch a fraction, and that’s when the action heats up.

A red maple pollen grain consists of four cells. Each holds half the number of chromosomes contained in non-sexual red maple cells. One cell in the pollen grain is a tube cell. If the grain is lucky enough to germinate on the surface of a female flower’s stigma, the tube cell bores a tunnel to the ovary. Another of the pollen grain’s four cells is the aptly named generative cell. It divides, producing two sperm. If all goes well, the sperm wriggle down the pathway made by the tube cell.

In the ovary, a private place hidden from prying eyes, things turn kinky. A botanical ménage-à-quatre occurs in which each sperm couples with a separate partner. One fertilizes the egg. The other merges with a cell called the central cell. The central cell’s nucleus, unlike that of the sperm and the egg, holds the normal number of red maple chromosomes (typically seventy-eight).

The liaison between sperm and egg yields a seed. The coupling of sperm and central cell produces a fleshy, nutritive tissue that surrounds the seed. This stuff represents a sort of bank account. The calories and nutrients locked up in it will help the newly sprouted red maple begin its life of independence. (Conifers bequeath no such assistance to their progeny. They belong to a group of ancient origin known as the gymnosperms, which means, “naked seeds.”)

March and April bring botanical sex to the bushes as well as the treetops. Where I live along the Saranac River near Bloomingdale, the year’s first flowers appear on a shrub called beaked hazelnut. The pollen-shedding male flowers, an inch or so long, dangle like limp fingers. They’re called catkins. The catkins are colored the same gray-brown as the stem and hardly engage our attention.

The female flowers are another matter. They’re miniscule, but look at one through a hand lens or dissecting scope, and you’ll gasp. Each is shaped like a sea anemone and colored a juicy purple-pink.

Hazelnut sex follows the same general script as that of the red maple. Female flowers produce eggs in ovaries. Pollen from male flowers drifts, sticks, germinates, tunnels, produces sperm, and fertilizes. The result in this case are hazelnuts encased in husks with long, vaguely beak-shaped snouts. Collecting the nuts isn’t easy. As soon as they ripen, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, and a variety of birds gather them virtually overnight.

It seems strange to think of trees as having sex lives, but of course, they do, and on a grand scale. Every fruit of every hardwood tree, and every one of the countless thousands of naked seeds that rain from the ripe cones of a single pine, spruce, fir, hemlock, or tamarack, represents the penetration of an egg by a sperm. Some trees such as quaking aspen and American beech also reproduce asexually by sending up suckers from their roots, but this results in plants without genetic variation. Stirring the gene pool helps a species endure the hazards of life. Which surely explains why sex, despite its hazards, goes on just about everywhere.

So remember: when you’re driving through the Adirondacks in the early days of spring, keep an eye out for patches of pastel red and orange on the mountainsides. Think red maple, think sex, think red females and orange males, and contemplate the millions upon millions of seeds being conceived before your eyes.

2. O HEMLOCK! MY HEMLOCK!

If there’s a tree in the Adirondacks I love more than any other, it’s Tsuga canadensis, known to most of us as eastern hemlock, or simply hemlock. Hemlocks are grand—perhaps the biggest trees in the region by volume—and stand in our woods like shaggy giants from Tolkien. What’s more, for me they represent the spring from which much of the good in my present life flows. In a hemlock grove on my thirty-fourth birthday, I met a woman who awoke in me a passion for children and family life I never knew I possessed. Hemlocks came first. Then followed marriage, eighteen acres along the Saranac, and children.

Hemlocks loom more poignantly than ever in my thinking these days as the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect that wreaks havoc in hemlock stands, creeps ever closer to the specimens I know and love best. I gaze into the boughs of fine old trees along favorite trails and wonder if a decade hence the titans will still be living.

What we stand to lose if the insect can’t be stopped is enormous. Vintage hemlocks rise a hundred feet and more above valley bottoms, lower slopes, and gorges. The biggest ones we see are centuries old—old enough, perhaps, to have shaded Mohawks clad in deerskin when they traveled paths used for hiking and skiing today. Some of our finest hemlocks likely lived through the summer of 1609, when Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain explored the river and the lake that now bear their names. The trees play the long game. Starting from tiny seeds produced in grape-sized cones, they begin their careers in shade. Growth at first is tortoise-slow. Yet increment by increment, seedlings become saplings, and saplings shoot up in height and swell around the middle. In time the maturing hemlock rises up and breaches the forest canopy.

A stout old hemlock makes a glorious sight. Tens of thousands of delicate needles gleam a rich shiny green, and ridged bark shows handsome tints of gray, brown, and chestnut. The form of the tree is gnarly and disordered, yet I’ve always found it appealing.

Some wince at the name “hemlock.” They remember the story of the Greek philosopher Socrates who, for expressing radical ideas, was put to death with hemlock tea. Not to worry. The tree we call “hemlock” (for reasons unclear) is a member of the pine family. Its needles are believed to be nonpoisonous (don’t take my word for it) and rich in Vitamin C. Socrates’s hemlock was an unrelated flowering plant, a Eurasian herb in the umbel family, or Apiaceae. It’s called poison hemlock, or Conium maculatum, naturalized in America but uncommon in the Adirondacks. Poison hemlock looks something like its cousin, the wildflower known as Queen Anne’s lace.

In the warm months, hemlocks fill my binoculars with Blackburnian warblers. Male Blackburnians are colored a blazing orange and black, while the females, camouflaged for nest duty, are more subdued. These tiny birds, celebrated by bird watchers, haunt virtually every hemlock grove I know. The warbler is so closely associated with the tree that pioneering American ornithologists Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon mistook the female for a separate species. They called it the hemlock warbler.

Personal associations aside, I cherish the hemlock most not for its birds, or for its rot-resistant wood, which my family and I chose for the sills of a horse barn we built this summer, or for its tannin-rich bark, which made my two-times-great grandfather Lewis Brownell of Northville wealthy from the proceeds of two Adirondack tanneries he owned. I prize the trees for the deep, dark, brooding mood they impart to the places where they gather. They set a mood I find entrancing.

As the adelgid nears us, I brace for mourning. The prospect of losing the trees brings to my mind Walt Whitman’s outpouring of grief for Abraham Lincoln in his wrenching poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” The hemlocks here have not yet fallen, at least in quantity, but the assassin has entered the theater.

3. CONIFERS AND THEIR CONES

As summer moves toward autumn in our neck of the woods, cones command my attention. Perhaps, as along roadsides I give in to the temptation of vanilla and chocolate, pistachio and maple, black raspberry and orange-vanilla swirl, I’m bracing for winter scarcity. In Adirondack forests, cones are on offer, too. These, too, come small, medium, and large.

Among the small in the woods are tamarack, eastern hemlock, northern white cedar, and black spruce. Tamarack and northern white cedar cones measure only about a half inch long. Hemlock cones extend about three-quarters of an inch, and black spruce cones around an inch.

The point at which a small cone grades into a medium is highly subjective, just as it is at ice cream stands. In the medium class I put red spruce (around an inch and a half), white spruce (averaging a tad longer, the scales tending to be squared on the ends rather than rounded, as red spruce cone scales are), red pine (somewhere around two inches long), and balsam fir (about three inches long).

Maybe there are more red squirrels around this year—their numbers fluctuate with variations in cone crops—or maybe balsam fir cones are so numerous the squirrels are struggling to keep up with the job of storing all those they’ve felled. Whatever the explanation, I’m seeing extraordinary numbers of balsam fir cones on the ground during recent walks. Most if not all the balsam cones we find at our feet were snipped and dropped there by squirrels. (Left to mature on their own, the cones fall apart on the trees.) The rodent’s relationship with conifers is longstanding. They are both consumers of conifer seeds and sowers of them. Red squirrels stash surplus cones in underground food caches, certain (because they clipped the cones before they had a chance to open) the seeds are still inside. If they gathered mature cones, red squirrels might miss most of the seeds.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The largest cones in our woods are those of white pines, which run to five inches and more in length sharply toward the ends. Along our dead-end road, Norway spruces were planted. Here we find the somewhat cylindrical cones of this species, which average about six inches.

Cones, and the conifers that make them, made their debut on the planet nearly 300 million years ago, long before there were dinosaurs. Reproductive structures, cones come male or female. The males are often no longer than a fingernail and produce pollen, often in prodigious volume. Conifer pollen turns white automobiles yellow. It gilds the surface of ponds. At our house, it blows through window screens and leaves volcanic-ash-like deposits over floors, furniture, and freshly washed laundry.

Each grain of pine pollen consists of four cells. One of these is a generative cell that divides and produces two sperm. Female cones are sticky. When a pollen grain lands on one and gets stuck, female tissues expand to enfold it.

With their pollen gone, male cones have no raison d’être. They rain onto the ground, looking like puffed rice grains. Few of us note their passing. In fact, we trample them. Meanwhile female cones proceed with the slow process of making, ripening, and releasing seeds. The time from pollination to seed dispersal may take two years or more.

This morning, out for a walk with my wife and four kids (two humans, two goats), I spied handsome new cones, all but ripe, on a balsam fir. Female fir cones occur high on the trees, with the males located lower down. This is likely an adaptation for promoting cross-pollination. If the male cones were positioned on top, much of their pollen would land on the female cones of the same tree. Arranged as they are and carried by wind, the pollen of one tree mainly reaches the female cones of neighbors.

Junipers, which are conifers, produce seeds within structures that look more like fleshy fruits than cones. Juniper “berries,” famously used to flavor gin, are actually cones surrounded by pungent, fleshy material that attracts birds such as cedar waxwings. Birds eat the cones, digest the soft parts, and disperse the seeds.

Most of us gorge on an ice cream cone now and again, but when it comes to conifer cones we draw the line. Still, we eat “pine nuts,” harvested from a variety of large-seeded pines that grow elsewhere. To Adirondack humans, cones mainly have aesthetic value. Still, they have enormous practical worth to the red squirrels, crossbills, and other wild creatures that rely on their seeds for food.

4. SWEETEST TREE IN THE NORTH WOODS

When March comes to the Adirondacks, woodpeckers aren’t the only animals out in the woods drilling holes in tree trunks. Men, women, and children are doing it, too. They’re not after insects. They’re drilling for sugar.

Why do we humans tap trees only as winter segues to spring? Answering that simple question requires a crash course in the biology of trees in general, and of maples in particular.

The green leaves of trees are sugar factories. As we learned in high school, they take the energy of sunlight and use it to forge bonds between atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The result? Carbohydrates, a class of chemical compounds that include the sugars we overindulge in at our peril. Cellulose and lignin—the chief constituents of wood—are carbohydrates, too. These compounds store solar energy in their bonds. Any organism that can cash in the bonds stands to reap handsome dividends.

Unfortunately, we humans can’t dismantle cellulose and lignin like a great many fungi can, and like microorganisms in the guts of termites and ruminants can. If we could, trees would be candy canes. Yet we readily digest sucrose, or table sugar. This simple compound is the chief sugar found in the sap of maple trees.

During the leafy summer months, maple trees manufacture sucrose (and to lesser degrees, glucose and fructose) in their trademark leaves. In autumn, the sugars are bound together to form complex carbohydrates called starches. A sugar maple stores starches through the winter in its roots and wood.

Come late winter, when days begin to climb above freezing but nights remain cold, remarkable things begin to happen inside maple trees, despite the fact that they still look lifeless. Starches convert back to sugars by way of a process called saccharification. The sugars will soon be needed in twigs and buds where they’ll play important roles in the transformation of tissues into the flowers of April and the leaves that unfurl in May and remain open for business in summer.

How will the sugars get there? Not the usual way we were taught in high school biology class. By that process, operative in July but not in March, cells in the wood called xylem carry water and minerals up from the soil, while cells in the inner bark called phloem take sugars produced in the leaves and “flow ’em” down toward the ground. If you think about it, a powerful force must be at work to pull water, which weighs about eight pounds per gallon, up the trunk. The force is called “evapotranspiration pull.”

It works as follows. Sun shines on a leaf and evaporates a molecule of water. Because so-called hydrogen bonding causes water molecules to stick to each other, every molecule that sails off into the sky tugs the one behind it, and that tugs the next, and so on, like a freight train. The train, or water column, extends all the way down to the roots.

In March and April, however, things are backward. They have to be. No leaves are on hand to send locomotive water molecules into the sky. At this time of year, xylem, rather than phloem, ferries the sugars toward their destinations.

As maple sugar makers have known for centuries but scientists have only grasped the underpinnings of in recent years, freezing and thawing are the keys. Cold nights lead to gas absorption and declining pressures inside the xylem. The drop in pressure draws moisture from the soil into the roots and up the trunk. Some of the water freezes and forms an icy lining inside the tubelike xylem cells. Inside the expanding ice, gases are compressed.

Then comes sunrise. Temperatures creep above freezing. Inside the xylem, ice melts, releasing gases that expand and exert pressure, forcing water up the trunk. Simultaneously, starch that spent the winter in ray cells in the wood breaks down, and the resulting sugars diffuse into the rising sap.

Over the course of a March day, the process plays out. Sap flow usually slows to a halt by nightfall. The yield? A hole drilled by a sugar maker with a hand or power auger may yield three gallons of sap over the course of a good day, although for several years I tapped a tree that could produce eight or nine gallons. Maple sap looks like water but is slightly sweet to the taste. It may contain between half a percent of sugar to 10 percent, with the average being 2 or 3 percent. As most of us who live in maple sugar country know, about forty gallons of sap boil down to a gallon of thick, sticky syrup.

There’s something about maples and the way they absorb and hold gas in their wood that seems to make the whole business possible. But maples aren’t the only trees that produce sweet, tasty sap. A friend of mine experimented with making syrup from butternuts, black walnuts, and hickories, and each yielded a product pleasing to the tongue.

5. OUR UNSUNG MAPLE

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river,” piped John Lennon, “with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” Had Lennon composed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” not at home in England but while canoeing on a breezy day in the Adirondacks, he would have admired not imaginary tangerine trees but real plants, tall and alive and shimmering with silver. They’d have been maples, silver maples, perhaps the most characteristic tree of our riverbanks and floodplains.

We celebrate lots of trees for one thing or another—white pines for their straight boles and colossal height, and sugar maples for their richly sweet sap, to cite a couple of local examples. Yet when praise is doled out, the silver maple tends to be forgotten. Part of the reason is that a great many of us associate the silver maple, if we know it at all, as an icon of suburban sprawl. Housing developers plant silver maples next to newly built houses. In ten years, they can sprout to twenty-five feet. To plant them amid newly minted chip-board domiciles is to create an almost instant shady neighborhood.

Unlike the sugar maple, which grows more slowly and produces wood that’s nearly rock-hard, inspiring the nickname “rock maple,” the silver fills out its rough-barked trunk with wood that’s soft by comparison and prone to splitting. Foresters lump silver maple with its close cousin the red maple as “soft maples.” It’s a term uttered without fondness. The main value of soft maple is low on the glamor scale. It’s cut down, ground up, stewed in a chemical bath, and rolled out as paper pulp.

Another reason silver maple isn’t better known has to do with its habitat. Unless you prowl newly minted housing developments (vintage housing developments tend to replace silver maples with other species less prone to shedding limbs on roofs and Volvos), you aren’t likely to encounter it much. Still, there are exceptions. Those of us who climb into canoes, kayaks, and fishing boats and venture out on rivers, streams, and lakes tend to brush against silver maple branches everywhere we turn.

Red maples grow along water courses, too. How to distinguish the two? In autumn, it’s easy. Red maples go up in a blaze of glorious ruby or crimson. Silver maples turn a demure yellow that quickly wrinkles and wanes to brown. In spring, differentiating the two can be trickier. The bark of both species varies widely and can be nearly identical.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

If the leaves are out, the shallow sinuses, or notches, between the lobes of red maple leaves contrast with the deep sinuses between the silver’s lobes. If the leaves are not yet out, which in the northern Adirondacks they won’t be until around Mother’s Day, you can tell the two apart by their flowers.

Red maple flowers tend to show much more red than silver maple flowers. The female, or pistillate, flowers of the red maple are entirely red. Usually they occur on separate trees from the male flowers, but sometimes the two are found together on the same plant. Male red maple flowers are mostly red, but the filaments of their stamens are yellow, giving the male trees a red-plus-yellow-equals-orange look when you see them at a distance.

The flowers of the silver maple vary widely. Some may be perfect (meaning they contain both female and male working parts), while others consists only of female parts or male parts, either on the same plant or separately. Overall, silver maple flowers tend to be green or yellow rather than red. Still unsure? Grab a twig. Scratch and sniff. Red maple twigs have little or no fragrance. Silver maple twigs tend to smell rank.

Both silver and red maples blossom early in spring and set seed before summer. This differentiates them from our other maples, which bloom later and set seed in summer or early fall. Silver maples produce the largest winged seeds, or samaras, of any North American maple. They hang from the trees in great clusters and are on full display when many of us take to the water in springtime. Each winged seed may measure two inches long. Some are longer.

The “silver” in the silver maple’s name comes from the leaves, which have silvery undersides. Red maple leaves typically have silvery under-sides, too, but those of silver maples are more likely to flip in a breeze and show their shiny undersides. In a stiff wind, air racing past the lacy edges of silver maple leaf blades produces a hissing distinctive to the species. It’s a signature sound of spring canoe and kayak trips.

The life trajectory for a typical silver maple is one of rapid ascent, then decline. Time can be hard on the tree, dividing its trunk, breaking off its limbs, and leading to all manner of compromise and decay. Before the tree dies, though, it may well house a nest of wood ducks or mergansers in a hollow in the trunk. Squirrels and various birds feast on the fruits. The silver maple’s shallow fibrous roots do their part, too. Even years after the tree’s death at age one hundred or thereabouts, its underground parts help to stabilize banks and shores—one more gift of the silver maple to the community in which it grew.

6. A SOCIETY OF BIRCHES

Those of us old enough to remember the breakup of the Beatles remember what a thrill it was to drive to Lake Placid via the pass between Cascade and Pitchoff Mountains, taking in the spectacle of white, or paper, birches that crowded up to the roadside. By the thousands they marched down the slopes to meet the road and reach their supple limbs over it. Travelers passing through the leafy tunnel savored a smorgasbord of white trunks, curving limbs, sprays of delicate twigs, and the greenest leaves this side of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Judging by people’s reactions on the nature walks I’ve been leading for more than thirty years, birches are among the most beloved of trees. Why? No doubt good looks have something to do with it. The appreciation of birches may also correlate with their ease of identification. In most cases, even the most speedy and least botanically inclined of hikers can name birches when they see them.

What makes a birch so easy to pick out of a trailside lineup? In a word, lenticels. These are hyphen-like clusters of pores that pock the typically smooth bark of young birches. A lenticel permits the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the living tissues (inner bark, cambium, and sapwood) lying just beneath the bark. Lenticels are not unique to birches. They dot the surfaces of some varieties of apple (the fruit, that is) and also occur prominently on the bark of cherry trees.

Four kinds of birch trees are widespread in the Adirondacks. (Two more, both dwarf species, hunker low to the ground on high summits.) Two of the widespread four, paper, or white, birch, B. papyrifera, and yellow birch, B. alleghaniensis, are well known to most of us. The other two are less familiar, at least by name. These are gray birch, B. populifolia, and mountain paper birch, B. cordifolia.

“White birch” is something of a misnomer. Three of our Adirondack birches (paper, mountain paper, and gray) are typically white-trunked. “Paper birch” isn’t particularly helpful, either, because the mountain white birch also peels in scroll-like sheets. An old name, canoe birch, makes the most sense. Tall, stout B. papyrifera of low slopes and valleys surely supplied American Indians with bark for canoes, not the smaller and less accessible mountain white birches that grew high up on peaks.

Our Adirondack poet laureate of trees, the late Ed Ketchledge, wrote in his superb Forests and Trees of the Adirondack High Peaks Region (Adirondack Mountain Club, 1996), “Practically every stand of [paper] birch is living testimony to the occurrence of fire—usually severe fire that burned everything down to the bare mineral soil.” White birch seems to be a pyrophyte, a plant that thrives on fire and may actually promote it. There’s irony in this. When a wildfire sweeps through a forest, paper birches, with their flammable bark, are quick to die. Yet at least in the Adirondacks, the species seems to require fire to prepare a place for its ascendancy.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Genetic studies of paper birch reveal complexity. Most individuals carry seventy chromosomes in their cell nuclei, but some have eighty-four and a few fifty-six.

Around 2,500 feet, paper birch yields to mountain paper birch. Distinguish the two by the heart-shaped leaves of the high country species (paper birch leaves are generally oval), and the tendency of mountain paper birch bark when it peels to expose bronze or red bark underneath. Altitude, of course, is strongly suggestive. Mountain paper birch, which has twenty-eight chromosomes, was until recently considered a variety of paper birch.

Gray birch can be just as white as paper, or white, birch and mountain paper birch but is easily distinguished. It’s a small tree, typically no more than twenty or thirty feet in height. Most gray birches consist not of a single trunk but several sprouting from a common base. Drooping black mustaches adorn the bark where branches once attached. If the bark peels, it does so modestly. The leaves are triangular. In the Adirondacks we see gray birches mainly in disturbed places such as roadsides and clear-cuts.

If one birch typifies our deep, dark, moody Adirondack forests it’s the yellow. This tree grows widely except at upper elevations, mixing generally with other species rather than forming pure stands, although it may form pure stands after logging. The bark of young yellow birches displays coarse lenticels, a glossy sheen, and a yellowish cast. Like a bad sunburn, it peels in tatters. Old-growth trees can grow to one hundred feet or more and may be four feet across at the bottom. The bark divides into rough plates on which the telltale lenticels are often obscured.

Methyl salicylate, the chemical that gives wintergreen plants their appealing scent and flavor, also occurs in the sap of yellow and white birches. The yellow is especially rich in it. Scratch and sniff a twig from a suspected yellow birch, and you’ll know at once if you’re barking up the right tree.

7. HOLLIES WITHOUT PRICKLES

When most of us think of the woody plants known as hollies, we picture green, prickly leaves and glossy scarlet berries garnishing houses at Christmastime. American holly, Ilex opaca, a small tree that flourishes on the sandy soils of the Atlantic seaboard, and English holly, I. aquifolium, both bear waxy, evergreen, sharp-toothed leaves and gleaming red berries. If you haven’t met them in the wild, you know them as decorations. These plants define the holly stereotype. But the stereotype won’t do you much good when hunting wild Adirondack hollies.

Our hollies are deciduous. They don’t have thick, waxy, spike-toothed evergreen leaves. The Adirondack hollies we encounter while hiking, biking, hunting, fishing, and paddling stand barren of leaves much of the year. No one uses them as Christmas decorations.

Picture leaves that are thin, supple, and soft. No thick leathery foliage of the kind you find in florist shops, and no sharp points punctuating the edges. Our two widely distributed Adirondack hollies, the common winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and the mountain holly (I. mucronatus), both bear thin leaves that in autumn flutter to the ground. Common winterberry leaves are fringed with fine soft serrations. Mountain holly leaves are smooth-edged.

The holly stereotype holds when it comes to the fruits of the common winterberry and mountain holly. Think bold and red. Winterberry ripens its drupes in late summer and fall, mountain holly in mid to late summer. Generally, winterberries blaze fire-truck red while mountain-holly fruits, “perhaps the most beautiful of berries,” according to Henry Thoreau, tend toward maroon. In Europe during the Middle Ages, hollies were hung over doorways (and still are at Christmas) because Christ’s blood was said to turn the unripe white fruits red. The holy presence was also believed to repel witches.

While the holy presence can be debated, it’s established scientific fact that all holly berries contain ilicin, a compound that sickens humans. Mice and birds eat the fruits, however, and undoubtedly other wildlife do, too. Mountain holly fruits seem to be tastier, more nutritious, or both. Generally they vanish down throats well before the leaves drop. Winter-berry fruits, by contrast, last a while; hence winterberry. Fat, the thing birds most prize in a fruit during the cold months, is hardly to be found in a winterberry. Only in late fall and winter (or even sometimes as late as early spring) when fruits in general become desperately scarce do birds and rodents descend on winterberry thickets and strip away their color.

Individual holly bushes tend to be male and female. This means that only some bear fruit, while others specialize in the production of pollen.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

When you’re out in the woods exploring, look for common winterberry and mountain holly in wet places. Winterberry often occurs abundantly along streams and riverbanks. The shrubs represent a familiar sight to botanically savvy paddlers. They abound, for example, along the Saranac River in riverbank thickets and floodplain swamps. Mountain holly flourishes in high-acid soils such as those along the fringes of bogs and other cool, waterlogged expanses of sphagnum. Yet once you learn to recognize its twiggy growth habit, you’ll spy it on high ground, too. Mike “Doc” Kudish, author of Adirondack Upland Flora (The Chauncy Press, 1992) and a longtime professor of forestry at Paul Smith’s College, reported mountain holly thriving all the way to timberline, including at 4,857 feet on the wind-scoured summit of Dix.

Unless you’ve had long practice, actually recognizing a common winterberry or mountain holly if you bump into one isn’t easy. Watch during the warm months in appropriate soggy winterberry habitat for shrubs with clusters of tiny white flowers or pale ripening fruits. The toothy leaves occur one here, one there along the twigs, are two to four inches long, faintly toothed, and widen toward the end. For mountain holly, search for shrubs with small, symmetrical, smooth-edged leaves. The greenish-white female flowers, the ones that ripen into berries, appear at the ends of thin stems an inch or more in length.

In an odd twist of biogeography, hollies, classic plants of the Northern Hemisphere, may have originated in the Southern. Early fossil remains occur in Australia in rock more than one hundred million years old. (In a parallel irony, marsupials, the group of pouched mammals that includes kangaroos, occur first as fossils in China and North America, not Australia.) Hollies are ancient plants. Plant-eating dinosaurs such as triceratops may well have fed on their leaves.

Mountain holly berries are generally long gone by the time full fall color arrives, their indigestible seeds expelled by birds here and there in the woods. The embryos inside take years to develop. Common winter-berries, by contrast, may live on through December, January, and beyond. When snow starts to fall and leaves vanish, make your acquaintance with winterberry. Along rivers and streams, look for many-branched shrubs with gray twigs and small clusters of scarlet, pea-sized fruits. Don’t be tempted to eat them. They contain less toxin than that of aptly named southern holly, Ilex vomitoria, but plenty enough to ruin your day. Until ruffed grouse, overwintering songbirds, and rodents get around to collecting them, savor their warm color—a happy sight on a cold day.

8. BEWITCHED BY WITCH-HAZEL

While trees and flowering herbs such as trilliums and orchids monopolize most of the botanical limelight in the Adirondacks, shrubs must not be overlooked. They unfurl some of our prettiest flowers, supply much of our tastiest and energy-rich fruit, offer nesting habitat for birds, and provide shelter during harsh weather to creatures great and small. Among North Country shrubs, one species stands out, not so much as the best for housing and feeding animals or floral color, but as, plainly, the weirdest. I refer to Hamamelis virginiana, or witch-hazel.

Witch-hazel has the peculiar habit of opening its flowers for business not in warm, sunny spring or summer, but during cold, hard November or December. It’s downright bizarre. “Winterbloom” is a name for this plant. So is “snapping alder,” for the fact that the leaves resemble those of alders (speckled alder, Alnus incana, abounds in Adirondack wet places) and their fruits open with loud cracks. The bursting of the pods can shoot the bullet-like seeds ten or twenty feet.

Why open flowers for business in autumn or winter when pollinators are scarce? It’s an open question. Certainly with nothing else in bloom, witch-hazel must find it easy to attract the attention of cold-tolerant insects. Studies have shown that witch-hazel’s Cupids are mainly nectar- and pollen-seeking fungus gnats, parasitic wasps, and hoverflies.

As in all so-called higher plants, pollen delivers the sperm that fertilize eggs cradled in ovaries. An odd thing about witch-hazel embryos is that after they’re created, they’re put on hold. It’s winter. The plant is virtually shut down physiologically and in no position to manufacture offspring ready for dispersal. So witch-hazel archives its embryos until spring, when they begin developing in earnest.

Botanically, witch-hazel is a lone wolf, at least in the Adirondacks. It has no close relatives. Most of its kin live in Asia, although a second, smaller witch-hazel species occurs in the American South. Sweetgum trees, ranging from Dixie northward to the coast of Connecticut, also belong to the same offbeat family.

When I was a child, my North Country–born mother tended to treat major body aches in the household with witch-hazel rubdowns. The liniment, still sold in drugstores, wafts a distinctive medicinal smell that inspires faith, possibly misguided, in its curative powers. Essence of witch-hazel, distilled from green twigs, also turns up in toothpaste, facial cleansers, and lotions. There’s little or no whiff of the final, astringent product in the plant itself. Old-time Adirondack pharmacists probably made witch-hazel lotion the traditional way: by pulverizing young twigs and roots and steeping them in alcohol. Does the stuff bear any genuine health benefits? The jury remains out.

There are several stories explaining how witch-hazel got its name. The most colorful (and perhaps least reliable) is that the plant, flowering around or after Halloween and clearly peculiar with its crooked growth habit, gangly yellow blossoms, and explosive seedpods, was historically associated with witches. Dowsers, also known as water-witchers, sometimes choose forked sections of witch-hazel as divining rods.

More credible theories have to do with wych, an old English sound-alike of “witch.” The witch-hazel found by early English settlers in northeastern North America likely reminded them of the wych-elm (Ulmus glabra), a widespread English tree, and of English hazels (genus Corylus), which are close relatives and look-alikes of our native American hazelnuts. Wych is an old word for “water.” It probably refers to the English tree’s tendency to grow in wet places. Wych also derives from the same linguistic root as wicker and may refer to the plant’s bending stems. Either way, witch-hazel’s striking name likely has no connection to women in black pointed hats who traverse the night sky on broomsticks.

The distribution of witch-hazel inside the Adirondack Park is spotty. Michael Kudish’s Adirondack Upland Flora notes its occurrence chiefly on the shores of Lake Champlain and along the Ausable and Bouquet River drainages in places such as Wilmington, Keene Valley, and Elizabethtown. It often thrives on wet ground, although moderately dry valley sites may support it, too.

When looking for witch-hazel, keep your eyes peeled for many-trunked bushes, some as tall as you are, or taller, with brown or gray-brown bark. In November and December, the broad, glossy leaves will be down, but rummage on the ground or in the snow and you may find a few. Note the leaves’ distinctive wavy edges. If the flowers are out, you’ll see that they’re yellow and adorned with four long, skinny, crooked petals.

Witch-hazel is singular in that its flowers and ripe seedpods (the fruit, literally, of the previous year’s flowers) appear at the same time. The capsules are hard and knobby, angular but vaguely spherical, and measure about a half-inch across. Watch out for them. Hike past a patch of witch-hazel at the moment the seeds are ready for launching, and bullets may come a-flying!

9. FRUITS OF THEIR LABORS

As summer wanes, autumn begins to spatter the woods with color. Despite all the praise heaped on sugar and red maples this time of year, they don’t merit all of the credit, nor, for that matter, do trees in general. In fact, a good deal of the season’s most dazzling colors appear on shrubs, especially the ones known as viburnums.

I learned in my salad days that viburnums belong to the honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae. But that truth has gone south. Scientists who look at the chemical nature of plants as well as their physical features have convinced botanists in general that viburnums, which include nine shrubs and small trees found in the Adirondacks, belong not among the honeysuckles but with common and red elders and Adoxas in the family Viburnaceae. The only wild Adoxa in New York State is muskroot, Adoxa mschatellina, known to grow only on cool, breezy Catskill Mountain slopes in Greene and Delaware Counties.

In our nearly Vermont-sized park, we can rejoice in our wealth of viburnums. At least nine species are native to our mountains and valleys. With the exception of mooseberry, Viburnum edule, which I’ve never set eyes on but which the New York State Flora Atlas lists in my home county, Essex, I can vouch for the good looks of all of them. They’re especially handsome when graced with ripe fruit in late summer and fall.

If pressed to name a favorite, I’d point to northern wild-raisin. This shrub is perhaps the most conspicuous of any growing on our property along the Saranac River. Its green, glossy leaves process the solar energy that enable the plants to produce sweet, pungently flavored fruit called drupes. When fully ripe, the drupes are blue and wrinkled and vaguely suggestive of the raisins made by drying grapes.

A key difference between a store-bought raisin and a wild-raisin, aside from the deliciously uncivilized taste of the backwoods fruit, is the presence in the viburnum drupe of a hard seed, or stone. It occupies much of the volume of the fruit and is flattened like those in watermelons. One of the pleasures of autumn hikes is taking those flattened seeds and seeing how far you can spit them. If someone faults you for your mischief, acquit yourself with the truth. You’re helping the plant disperse its seeds.

Among the prettiest sights of early to mid fall are the multicolored hues of wild-raisins ripening at their own individual schedules. In any given bunch, you might find green, pink, red, blue, and black on show simultaneously.

Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides, formerly V. alnifolium and also known as witch-hobble) and highbush cranberry (Viburnum opulus, var. americanum) splash color across the woods, too. Most Adirondack viburnums produce fruits that turn from green to blue as they ripen, but these two species please our eyes with red. Hobblebush fruits are firm and for a time glow a brilliant fire-engine red. Eventually they turn blue-black. At that point, a few of us join the birds in eating them. Their flavor is strong and clove-like.

Highbush cranberry fruits begin green, turn brilliant glossy red, and then remain red until winter, when they often take a long time to disappear. Birds seem in no hurry to consume highbush cranberries. Perhaps its because they’re wickedly sour, even more so than genuine cranberries. (Real cranberries, confined largely to bogs and fens, are low, creeping plants in an entirely different family.) Twice, our late Wanakena friends Rhody and Bill Lea gave us jars of highbush cranberry jelly they’d made. It was wonderfully tart, despite the fact that they stirred in great quantities of sugar.

A viburnum more abundant in the eastern, Champlain Valley side of the Adirondacks than in the interior is nannyberry (Viburnum lentago). Only recently have we discovered it on our property, towering over wild-raisins and catching my eye (after years of marching past it, oblivious) with lustrous leaves more long-pointed than those of wild-raisins and flower clusters with no stalks attaching them to the branches.

I’ve heard two origin stories for “nannyberry.” One suggests that the stink of the crushed twigs or leaves or the musky bouquet of the flowers smells like a wet nanny goat. The problem with this theory is that the BO of wet billy goats wrinkles the nose, too. Why then specify “nanny”? The other notion is that nanny goats love to eat nannyberry fruits, while billy goats don’t. One day I’ll invite goat farmer friends to put that theory to the test.

Other Adirondack viburnums found mainly in the low country toward Lake Champlain are black haw (V. prunifolium), which produces the most delicious of all our viburnum fruits and grows to be a small tree; maple-leaved viburnum (V. acerifolium, whose leaves indeed resemble maple leaves); and downy arrowwood (V. rafinesqueanum).

For pure good looks, and with no consideration of the edibility of its fruit (they’re too hard and dry to be worth bothering), my second favorite viburnum in the Adirondack woods is smooth arrowwood (V. dentatum var. lucidum). The leaves are pleasingly rounded, geometrically veined, and fringed by finely chiseled teeth, ergo the species name dentatum. The fruits ripen to a luminous shade of blue that has no equal in nature, at least that I can think of. American Indians are said to have made arrow shafts from arrowwood stems. Given their often crooked nature this seems unlikely until, as the Mohawk people of northern New York likely used to do, you prune arrowwood down to the ground. The stems that grow back, at least most of them, will be arrow-straight.

10. THREE BEAUTIES, ONE SPRING

It’s not easy being an early bloomer in the Adirondacks. As winter yields haltingly to spring, the ground thaws, refreezes, and thaws again. For a while the upper layer becomes a soup floating on top of a still iron-hard lower stratum beneath it. It’s mud season. Thermometers rise and fall and rise again. Pollinators are scarce on all but the warmest days. Yet bravely, defiantly, a few flowering herbs of the forest floor open for business.

Among them are three of my favorite wildflowers: hepatica (two similar species grow in our neck of the woods), spring beauty (also two species), and yellow trout lily. The first are pale-purple, pink, or white, the second candy-stripe pink on white, the third a rich pastel yellow.

I’ve never found hepatica in the acidic soils of my neighborhood along the Saranac River. Mainly I see it in the Champlain Valley side of the park, most recently in a place called Wickham Marsh, near Port Kent. A walk in the woods there in April turned it up. The outing turned up ticks, too, so be prepared if you’re going to get down on hands and knees and savor the sights and scents.

The hepatica I saw at Wickham Marsh is the round-lobed, Hepatica americana. The flowers, about a half inch to an inch across, are mostly pale-purple, although I saw a few individuals with white blossoms. Hepatica has a distinctive growth habit. It hunkers down on the forest floor in leaf litter. You have to look hard to find it. When you eventually spy one, a search image becomes fixed in your mind, and quickly you often find more. The slightly fleshy, liver-colored leaves are three-parted, round-lobed in the case of the round-lobed hepatica (no surprise) and pointed in the case of the sharp-lobed, H. acutiloba. The leaves often lie hidden in the duff. You may have to tease away fallen tree leaves to see them.

The naturalist John Burroughs wrote in the nineteenth century that some hepatica flowers have no scent at all, while others are sweet-scented. Inspired by Burroughs and by a beloved basset hound, Freckles, who roamed the woods with me when I was a teenager, I’ve spent hours on all fours, nosing my way along the ground in patches of hepatica, sniffing. Burroughs is right. Some individual plants bear blossoms with a rich candy-like scent, while others nearby may be scentless. Do some individual hepatica plants produce perfume while others do not, or is the presence or absence of fragrance a function of different flowering schedules? I’m not sure. Botanists place hepatica in the Ranunculaceae, or buttercup family.

The spring beauty may not be the only beautiful flower of spring, but it’s certainly high on the list. Two species grace the early spring woods in northern New York: the eastern spring beauty, Claytonia virginica, which has narrow grasslike leaves, and the Carolina spring beauty, C. caroliniana, which has leaves that are comparatively wide. Botanists recently shifted spring beauties from the purslane family, or Portulaceae, to the miner’s lettuce family, or Montiaceae.

While hepaticas hardly rise above the leaf litter, spring beauties stand a little taller, but not much. They might be called ankle brushers, growing as they often do in wet places along trails and swishing against hikers’ boots as they pass. The petals are five in number and tend to be white, striped with pink. Spring beauties with bright pink petals are also found. Dark pink lines on each petal direct bees and flies to nectar on offer in the center.

Blossoming time for spring beauties seems closely tied to temperature. When spring starts serving up days above 52 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s time to be on the lookout. The timing makes sense. As the air warms, bees and flies grow abundant. These are the chief pollinators of spring beauties. Once the plants set seed, ants come along, attracted by tasty, high-calorie treats called elaiosomes. Hepatica seeds have elaiosomes, too. Ants carry the seeds away, elaiosomes and all, and end up doing much of the planting.

According to Carol Gracie’s fascinating Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History (Princeton, 2012), the genetics of eastern spring beauties is downright strange. The chromosome count varies widely, not only from plant to plant but sometimes from leaf to root of the same plant. Perhaps, Ms. Gracie speculates, the variability in genetic make-up helps the plants grow in diverse conditions.

Finally, let’s admire the yellow trout lily, Erythronium americanum. A genuine member of the Liliaceae, or lily family, this plant was known a century ago as adder’s tongue and dogtooth violet. The flowers keep fairly low to the ground. So do the leaves, which are colored a lustrous blue-green speckled with brown. John Burroughs proposed that old and misleading names for the plant be jettisoned. He recommended “trout lily” because the plants grow along trout streams and produce leaves spotted like a trout. He offered the name “fawn lily,” too. “Trout lily” stuck.

Each newly sprouted yellow trout lily (the seeds are sown largely by ants in the same manner as hepaticas and spring beauties) produces a single leaf. After four to seven years, the plant builds up enough resources to make two leaves. With two solar panels rather than one, it gathers enough energy to produce a flower. Its key pollinators are blister beetles and bees.

Catch yellow trout lilies in bloom, and you’ll be glad you did. There are bigger, more glamorous wildflowers to be admired, but trout lilies are among the earliest and are certainly among the most handsome. When spring finally arrives to stay, yellow trout lilies are rarely hard to find.

11. SEXY ADIRONDACK ORCHIDS

Forty-three species of orchid, several common, some rare, have been recorded in the Adirondack Park, says Steve Young, the Albany-based program botanist for New York State’s Natural Heritage Program. Of these, most of us who hike, paddle, hunt, fish, birdwatch, and botanize in the park will only ever see a dozen or so. Still, if you love green plants, you will be pleased to know that orchids are out there, among them some you’ll never meet.

Why the fuss over orchids? Their charisma is powerful but tricky to explain. My thinking is that it comes from two directions: from the outlandish shapes a great many orchids have evolved to attract pollinators, and from their sex appeal.

Do sexy flowers grow in our cold, respectable Adirondack forests? You bet. Start with the word orchid. It’s Greek for testicle, a reference to the bulbous form of certain European orchid rootstocks. Then consider, by way of example, the most widespread and best known of our large Adirondack orchids, the pink ladyslipper. How to be delicate about this? The pair of pink, fleshy lips that form the conspicuous part of the flower, and that combine to form a wrinkled pouch, have been compared by botanists to various intimate elements of human anatomy. Other orchids provoke similar comparisons, making this group of plants the raciest members of our flora.

Even at a glance, there’s something peculiar about the average orchid. The strangeness only multiplies the more you get to know them. Consider their seeds. As a rule, flowering plants differ from primitive seed plants such as gymnosperms (a group that includes our pines, spruces, and firs) in that the ripened ovary of a flower produces an embryonic plant surrounded by nutritive material called endosperm. You might say that flowering plants send each of their seeds off into the world with a private bank account to get the seed off to a strong start. Orchids, though, are different. By the hundreds of thousands or millions, they manufacture seeds without endosperm. Tiny and dry, orchid seeds blow like dust in the wind. All die, except for a lucky few that land in the laps of fungal business partners. The fungus and its network of threadlike hyphae supply moisture and important nutrients to the growing orchid. In return, the fungus collects a portion of the sugar the plant manufactures through photosynthesis.

There are places where you can see more orchids than in the Adirondacks. The Amazon basin, for example, offers species by the thousands, and scores likely remain to be discovered. Nevertheless, our North Country contingent supplies plenty of excitement.

For one thing, there’s the thrill of the chase. You have to march into the woods in the warm months and seek orchids on your own. Aficionados rarely give away favorite spots, just as I will reveal none here. Secrecy is justified. Native orchids are protected by law, but this doesn’t stop poachers from visiting no-longer-secret places and digging up the plants, either for adding to their own gardens or for sale to private collectors. Even nature lovers of benign intent may visit a fragile orchid patch and trample it to death. So when it comes to orchid particulars, mum’s the word.

That said, I’m glad to share general hints on where to look and what to look for.

As spring yields to summer, in areas where the forest has been disturbed in recent decades, watch for the pink ladyslipper, Cypripedium acaule. Listen closely, and you may hear the buzzing of an irate bumblebee that has found its way inside the flower and is struggling to grapple its way out.

In bogs and other peaty places, in summer, seek two particularly appealing orchids, both colored lurid pink. The calopogon or grass-pink (Calopogon tuberosus), holds a fringed, yellow-tinted lip above a fan of broad pink petals and sepals, while the rose pogonia, or snake-mouth orchid (Pogonia ophioglossoides), features a French-tickler-patterned lip that droops downward. In each case the lip serves as a landing pad for insects.

Other glamorous orchids that can be sought here, with varying degrees of difficulty, are white-fringed orchid (Plantanthera blephariglottis), abundant in certain bogs; the greater yellow ladyslipper (Cypripedium calceolus), which thrives on soil “sweetened” by the erosion of limestone or marble; the showy ladyslipper (C. reginae), whose magnificent maroon-and-white blooms, crowning stalks festooned with extravagant foliage, make her the queen of the tribe; and the delicate, pink-and-yellow arethusa, or dragon’s mouth (Arethusa bulbosa), named for a Greek nymph who, when pursued by the lusty river god Alpheus, was turned by the goddess Artemis into a clear-flowing spring.

One Adirondack orchid, the helleborine (Epipactis helleborine), is actually a pesky weed introduced to North America from Europe.

My botanist neighbor Daun Dahlen, who taught biology at Paul Smith’s College for years, spends more time seeking and admiring orchids than anyone I know. Her favorite? “The snake-mouth,” she said. “It’s common and easy to show people, and I think it’s just”—Dahlen paused, choosing her next word with care—“beautiful.”

12. THE ORCHID AND THE BUMBLEBEE

If your brain is steeped in Thoreau and you see nature as a source of inspiration and instruction, or like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss you believe “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds,” it’s time you considered the relationship between the pink ladyslipper, a widespread and common Adirondack orchid, and the bumblebee.

Let’s start with the plant. It’s a stunner. Big, fleshy leaves marked with parallel veins rise from underground stems and pierce the leaf litter. It may take three years or more for a ladyslipper seed that’s germinated and formed a partnership with a helpful fungus to produce visible leaves. And it may take several more years before the plant is big and strong enough to bloom. Then, a single bare stem will rise out of the leaf cluster. At the top will swell a plump and ponderous bud. Sometime in May or early June, the bud will open. Out will spring a flower, bulbous and pink, the marvel of everyone who sees it.

The pink ladyslipper’s scientific name is Cypripedium acaule. The first half of that tongue-twister comes from “Cyprus,” the island in the eastern Mediterranean, and “pedilon,” meaning foot. Ancient Greeks saw the orchids in this genus as slippers worn by the goddess Aphrodite, who was said to have materialized from the sea somewhere near Cyprus. “Acaule,” the species name, means “without a stem.” It refers to the fact that the pink ladyslipper bears its single blossom on a naked flower stalk, rather than on a leafy stem, as the showy and yellow ladyslippers do.

So far, so good. Things get peculiar when the pollination ecology of the pink ladyslipper is studied. It turns out that the blossoms have gone so far out on an evolutionary limb trying to keep out insects unable or unwilling to move their pollen that they have repelled all but bumblebees, and even then, only a species or two.

The chief pollinator in most pink ladyslipper locations seems to be the half-black bumblebee, Bombus vagans, widespread in the Northeast. It turns out, though, that in a given year, only a small fraction of pink ladyslippers are pollinated. The percentage has been estimated to be as low as 5. The other 95 percent are out of luck until they blossom again the following year.

Why such poor success in getting pollinated and making fruit, which is the job of every fertile flower? The answer seems to be two-parted. First, pink ladyslippers practice what botanist Carol Gracie, author of the engaging and erudite Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast, calls “a form of deceptive advertising.” They entice bumblebees with color, pattern, and scent. Yet once the insects penetrate the insides of the slipper-like labella, it seems they are rewarded for their troubles with no sweet nectar, no edible pollen, in fact, nothing of value at all.

The other side of the equation concerns the ordeal a bumblebee has to endure to extricate itself. Once in, the only way out is to scale the inside of the pink ladyslipper’s pouch and wriggle through one of two narrow passages. As the bumblebee pushes toward freedom, its back contacts the flower’s sticky stigma. There pollen from a previous visitation (if any) may be deposited. Next the insect brushes past organs that daub on yellow pollen. The trauma of finding its way out of a pink ladyslipper is probably not something a bumblebee is eager to repeat.

For years I put my ears up to ladyslippers, hoping to hear bumblebees inside. I never succeeded. I peered inside, looking for pollinators, and also found nothing. Eventually, desperate to watch a pink ladyslipper entertain a visitor, I took matters into my own hands.

It was early June. I marched outside with my daughter’s insect net and scooped up the first bumblebee I could find. It was, if I’m not mistaken, a half-black bumblebee, the species believed to pollinate most pink ladyslippers. With the net folded over to prevent escape, I hurried down the road to a place where I knew I’d find a blooming ladyslipper.

Carefully, so as not to get stung, I worked the net over the flower. With a nudge, the bee found its way into the notch in the blossom’s labellum. I removed the net, knelt, and waited. And waited. The bee didn’t fly off. Perhaps it was interested. Perhaps not. For fifteen minutes nothing happened. Finally, I picked up a twig and gave the insect’s bottom the most delicate of prods. The bee took the hint and crawled inside the pouch.

Keeping close watch on the exit holes, I waited. And waited. A half hour passed. Finally, I parted the labellum and peeked inside. The bumblebee seemed torpid. I blew on it gently to see if it was still alive. It twitched. I waited some more.

More than an hour passed before the insect completed its mighty struggle. Free at last, it looked an utter mess, its hairlike fuzz matted and damp, its energy sapped. I left it outside the exit hole, still on the plant, and walked home. What I’d seen suggested that the miniscule pollination rate I’d read about was probably not an exaggeration.

13. THE SECRET LIFE OF JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT

Just when we think we’ve heard the last scandal involving clergymen, botanists have revealed the shocking secret life of that most upstanding of our Adirondack wildflowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum. Scientists poking their noses (literally) into the flower’s private life tell us that the plant, which is said to resemble a minister standing upright in a church pulpit, is in fact—brace yourself—a sequential hermaphrodite.

Consider the details. Every Jack-in-the-pulpit begins life as a seed, encased within a poisonous red fruit. If the seed is lucky, it germinates and begins putting down roots and sending up foliage. The three-parted leaves look vaguely, but only vaguely, like those of the bristly, woody vine we call poison ivy. Jack-in-the-pulpit leaves are rarely shiny, as poison ivy leaves often are, and they’re rarely toothed, which poison ivy leaves tend to be. (When in doubt, don’t touch.)

Look for Jack-in-the-pulpit in moist woods. Michael Kudish, longtime professor of forestry at Paul Smith’s College and author of Adirondack Upland Flora (1992), reported finding the plant most often under sugar maple, but also occurring under American basswood, white ash, and elm. It flowered, he reported, about the first of June. Kudish found the plant as high as 2,200 feet on Pitchoff Mountain and as low as one hundred feet above sea level along the shores of Lake Champlain.

Years pass. Young Jack builds up starch in his underground stem, or corm. Then one spring after he has accumulated sufficient resources to underwrite a sex life, Jack sends up a flower, his first. Beside it unfolds, much like an umbrella, a single three-parted leaf.

Except in rare cases, this first blossom is male and produces only pollen. If you’re familiar with the plant, you picture what the flower looks like. If not, conjure a green finger-like thing sticking six inches or more above the forest floor. The green thing, called a spadix, is largely hidden inside a hood, or spathe. The spathe flops over at the top and may be striped green and white.

There are two ways to confirm the gender. Peer inside the spathe. If Jack is what he pretends to be, you’ll spy white or pale pollen-bearing flowers projecting from the base of the spadix. The other way is to examine the seam on the outside of the spathe. On male plants, where the vertical part of the sheath wraps around and meets itself, there’s a small exit hole. It allows insects daubed with pollen the chance to crawl out, fly off, and fertilize a female Jack, which really should be known as a Jill.

More years pass. If conditions favor growth, Jack adds to the energy savings account in his corm. Then one autumn the plant begins a remarkable switch. It produces, underground, the following year’s blossom. This time it forgets about being male. Instead of anthers and pollen it develops eggs and ovaries.

Holy smoke! Jack is giving himself a sex change. While that’s astonishing on one hand, on the other it’s perfectly natural.

The next spring, up pops the flower, typically larger than a male blossom. With it appear not one but two pairs of tripartite leaves. The leaves of female plants are usually more robust than those of the males. If you want to confirm the gender, kneel before the pulpit, or spathe. Inside, down at the bottom of the spadix, you should find not thin pale male parts but green knobby ovaries. As for the spathe, along the seam where Jack provided pollinators an exit hole, Jill offers none. Once a fly or some other airborne express representative drops male gametes on her stigmas, she doesn’t seem to give a damn whether the bug makes it out alive.

Indeed, inside the spathe of a Jill you often find a pile of dead insects.

Botanists suspect they know the reason for the lifestyle. Female plants face the energy-demanding work of manufacturing the wildflower’s gorgeous but toxic fruits. Apparently it pays to delay motherhood until the plant, which may live decades, has grown big and strong. It might as well be male in the process.

Ah, but the story holds another twist! Should growing conditions turn poor, or your hiking boot, or mine, terminate the leaves’ lives in their prime, Jill may decide come autumn that it’s best to conserve energy for a while. She’ll turn herself back into a Jack, producing male flowers to unfold the following spring. She’ll then remain male until the savings in the corm reach a point where motherhood again becomes practical.

It’s hard not to wonder if Jack-in-the-pulpit’s sex life is unusual. Do other Adirondack plants routinely practice gender-switching? We are just beginning to learn. A 1999 Canadian study of purple and big white trilliums (Trillium erectum and T. grandiflorum, respectively) found that while these plants produce bisexual flowers (a common condition in plants), small individuals tend to lean in the male direction, producing abundant pollen, while larger and typically older plants make little pollen and instead concentrate their energies on producing ovaries and eggs. This isn’t quite the racy drama staged by Jacks and Jills in pulpits, but it still borders on kinky.

14. THESE PLANTS ARE NO VEGETARIANS

Ever wondered what life would be like if you were a beetle? There would be advantages. The six-million-acre Adirondack Park would suddenly seem a whole lot bigger. Also, beetles being the most prolific of animals, you’d never find yourself part of a minority.

Yet being a bug would have a dark side. If you could think like a human, you’d live in mortal fear of bogs and soggy, bog-like places. Why? Things that eat beetles abound there. Not just birds and spiders, mind you, but flesh-devouring plants.

Here in our sedate, mild-mannered northern woods, the idea of plants murdering beetles and even larger animals seems, well, unseemly. But get used to it. Such plants abound in and around wetlands.

The most eye-catching of our vegetable carnivores are the pitcher plants. Eight species occur in North America, but only one, the purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, occurs in the park. Look for it in bogs, rising out of the sphagnum. Pitcher plants are easy to spot. Leaves shaped like tall, slender pitchers rise vertically out of the moss. Their mouths flare into broad red-veined lips.

In a cloudburst, the pitchers fill up like rain gauges. Through a combination of color (red like uncooked meat), structure (smooth parts, sticky parts, and downward-facing spikes), and drugs (a mild anesthetic), they hoodwink insects and other small creatures into falling into them and drowning.

In bogs, high acidity depresses the activity of agents of decomposition. Things that die tend to rot slowly if at all. This produces a growth medium for plants that’s low in important minerals such as phosphorus and nitrogen. Trees and shrubs that grow in bogs often appear stunted. But not pitcher plants. They look fleshy and lush, in part because they’ve evolved their lethal way of gathering nutrients.

The water inside a pitcher is fascinating stuff. Not only does it tend to be full of the dead and dying, but living things lurk there, too, things that thrive despite the presence of the plant’s digestive enzymes. Among these opportunists are fly larvae, mites, nematodes, rotifers, diatoms, protozoa, and bacteria. Tree frogs sometimes hole up and catch bugs in the mouths of pitchers. Frog bones found occasionally in the bottoms attest that this is a risky way of living.

Being wildflowers, pitcher plants produce blossoms in addition to leaves. The flowers are borne on long, slender stems and suggest, at least to my imagination, alien spacecraft. Most are pollinated by bumblebees. Scientists have discovered a connection between flowering and meat-eating. Pitcher plants that are in the process of producing flowers and fruits actively digest what they drown, while those that aren’t don’t.

Sundews (genus Drosera) often grow beside pitcher plants. They’re carnivores, too, but dramatically different in appearance and not closely related. When you meet them, say “G’day.” Sundews likely originated in Australia. Three-quarters of the world’s hundred-odd species still live there.

Our round-leaved sundews are ground-hugging and tiny. Ruby-red leaves radiate out from the center like spokes on a wheel, each shaped like a spoon or spatula, depending on the species. The leaves are fringed like human eyelids, with a sticky glue over all surfaces.

When a fly lands on a sundew, thinking it’s found a morsel of flesh or beads of sweet nectar, the glue catches it. Slowly, the fringes (actually tentacles) bend and surround it. Enzymes flow from the leaf, and the fly’s innards are liquefied, then absorbed. The process can take minutes, hours, or days. Interestingly, sundew leaves are smart enough to tell live, struggling insects from inanimate objects dropped by biologists.

One at a time, tiny sundew flowers open on slender stalks a few inches high. The flowers are usually white but sometimes pink.

The most colorful carnivorous plants in the Adirondacks, bladderworts, genus Utricularia, tend to be the least known. Numerous species occur here. I admire them in my travels by foot, canoe, bicycle, and automobile but admit a slothful habit of calling a bladderwort a bladderwort, rather than wading through warm, leech-haunted waters and into deep foul-smelling muck to examine them closely.

Why bladderwort? The name’s first half refers to tiny bladder-like sacs that occur in great number on the submerged leaves. “Wort” is an old English name for “plant.”

When biologists first began to study bladderworts, they assumed the bladders helped the plants float. This made a certain amount of sense. Bladderworts have no roots and tend to occur as floating mats in shallow water. But the bladders hold water, not air, and further study by Charles Darwin among others revealed the dramatic truth. The bladders are for murder.

Here’s how it works. When touched by a fairy shrimp, scud, copepod, water flea, tiny fish, protozoan, or some other miniature citizen of the planktonic soup, a bladder implodes. This sucks the victim inside. Digestion begins at once.

All of this happens underwater, where we don’t see it. What we do see are the bladderwort’s glamorous flowers. There’s a boggy old beaver pond in Coreys, near Tupper Lake, that I drive by from time to time in summer. Every year I look forward to the July morning when bladderworts have erupted in bloom and turned broad swaths of the pond a brilliant lemon-yellow. I admire the plants from a distance, feeling glad I’m not an insect.

15. ASTERS NO MORE

You know you’re getting old, or at least older, when you pick up a field guide, and all the birds or insects or plants you thought you knew are listed under unfamiliar names. That’s the experience I had a few years ago when I bought a copy of Oxford University Press’ excellent 2006 Wildflowers in the Field and Forest: A Field Guide to the Northeastern United States. I found that the 1968 Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers I’d been using for decades was out of date in its naming. More troubling, I’d recently shelled out more than $200 for the massive 1991 edition of Gleason and Cronquist, a botanical manual of the dry and humorless but comprehensive sort, and a companion volume of illustrations. Turns out they’re antiques, too. DNA studies are turning botanical and zoological taxonomy on its head. Among the most striking changes are new names for the flowers we call asters.

If you’re not familiar with asters, they bloom along with their distant cousins the goldenrods in late summer and fall. Asters resemble daisies and in fact are closely related to them. They’re kin of goldenrods, too. Along with such well known domesticated flowers as marigolds, coneflowers, dahlias, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers, asters and goldenrods bear composite flowers that look vaguely like lights in the night sky. The English word aster derives from an ancient Greek word meaning “star.” Each “petal” of an aster is in fact a flower in its own right. Each little knob in the aster’s central disk, which is often yellow, represents an individual flower, too. An aster “flower,” then, is not a single star-shaped blossom but an entire constellation. The petallike blooms are called ray florets, the central flowers disk florets. Altogether, a single “flower” contains dozens, scores, or more than a hundred individual blossoms—an adaptation, scientists believe, that maximizes the plant’s chances of being pollinated and setting abundant seed.

During the last quarter century, botanists and molecular biologists have taken a fresh, close look at North American “asters” and rethought their hitherto presumed close relations with the asters of Europe and Asia. Studies of floral characteristics and DNA have led scientists to the astonishing conclusion that all our asters save one shouldn’t be called asters at all, at least in scientific terminology. They’ve reassigned the plants to not just one genus, but to a smorgasbord of genera.

The only northeastern aster still properly called an aster is the alpine aster, Aster alpinus. According to the New York State Flora Atlas, it’s not known to bloom and set seed in the Adirondacks. Happily, the asters (we can still call them that, informally) that do grow here are well worth admiring and getting to know.

Among the most widespread is the whorled wood aster, Oclemena acuminata. I see it in deciduous and mixed woods almost everywhere I go. The plants stand about a foot high, although heights more than double that are possible. “Whorled” refers to the fact that the leaves appear to grow in rings, or whorls, around the stem. This is an optical illusion. Gaps occur between the nodes where the leaves attach, but they’re minute. The flowers, properly called inflorescences, are terminal. This doesn’t mean they suffer from a fatal disease. It refers to the fact that the flowers grow at the tops, or terminations, of the stems. The ray florets are white and often ragged looking. The disk florets are usually yellow but sometimes pale red.

The tall flat-topped white aster, Doellingeria umbellata, is aptly described by its name. This is among the grandest of our asters, standing up to seven feet high and tending to grow in moist thickets and along the edges of fields and swamps. The inflorescences are numerous but small, generally measuring not much more than a half inch across. The ray florets are white and disk florets yellow. Together the flower clusters are arranged so as to give the tall flat-topped aster its trademark flat top. Botanists call this floral setup an umbel.

The panicled aster, Symphyotrichum lanceolatum, bears abundant inflorescences, too, but this plant tends to grow, and grow abundantly, on drier sites than does the flat-topped. Its flowers occur in branchy arrangements called panicles. The composite flowers tend to be pale purple rather than white, and they’re a little larger (averaging around three-quarters of an inch across) than those of the flat-topped. A particularly grand panicled aster stands about five feet tall.

The most humble, if size is a measure of botanical humility, of Adirondack asters is the bog aster, Oclemena nemoralis. It grows in low, wet, mossy places such as bogs and stands a mere twelve inches or so high. A giant specimen might reach to your knees. Small though the bog aster is, the flowerheads are large, an inch to inch and a half across. They’re purple with yellow centers.

In fall, the showiest wildflower in the Adirondacks is the New England aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. It may stand as tall as an NBA player where you find it along the edges of woods and fields. The flowerheads please the eye. Each measures about an inch and a half across and combines up to one hundred purple or magenta rays with a yellow center. You may not be able to pronounce its current scientific name, but who cares? New England “asters” are gorgeous.

16. THIS PLANT STINKS

Say “skunk cabbage” to people who spend time in the woods, and responses tend to be negative. You’ll likely hear sighs, groans, or expressions of outright disdain. In the Adirondacks and elsewhere, this extraordinary plant, whose flowers erupt out of snow and ice in early spring, and whose giant green leaves unfold as the flowers are collapsing, tends to get a bad rap. It’s a pity. Skunk cabbage deserves to be celebrated as our first wildflower of the year. As for the smell, it’s not half as bad as the name suggests.

Sure, skunk cabbage’s scientific name is Symplocarpus foetidus. That means, in part, that it stinks. All right, the plant smells bad. But that’s only true if you abuse it. You have to step on skunk cabbage, kick it, tear it, or jam your nose into its reproductive parts before it offends your nose. So what? If your dog did any of those things to the mailman, he, or she, would be disagreeable, too. Take the challenge. Walk through a patch of skunk cabbage. If you don’t damage its leaves or stems, the worst you’ll detect is a faint sour smell, and you might not notice even that.

The coolest thing about skunk cabbage is how warm it can be on a cold day. In late winter, when the maroon-and-yellow-tinted hoods, or spathes, that enclose the skunk cabbage’s flower clusters erupt and open, they generate enough heat to melt their way through ice and snow. We rarely think of a plant generating metabolic heat like a bird or mammal does, but skunk cabbage breaks the rule. At least some of the time, skunk cabbage and a few other plants generate and radiate warmth.

Among assorted hot-blooded plants that grow scattered over the globe, skunk cabbage stands among the most accomplished heat generators of them all. Able to rise and shine a month or more before the ruck of Adirondack spring wildflowers, it produces a temperature inside the spongy, insulating spathe surrounding the flower cluster (called a spadix) that can reach 70 degrees Fahrenheit or more. When the ambient temperature dips below freezing, the space inside the spadix remains cozy and warm. The temperature difference between outside and in can be as much as 95 degrees!

Scientists haven’t worked out all the details of skunk cabbage’s central heating, but to paint the picture in broad strokes, carbohydrates stored in the plant’s root system are oxidized in a metabolic process, yielding warmth. We keep our own fires burning by metabolizing body fat, or by metabolizing starches and fats in our diet. Skunk cabbage taps its own starchy roots for energy, roots that in springtime store solar power collected by the plant’s extravagant leaves.

And what amazing roots and leaves they are! Botanist Carol Gracie, author of Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History (Princeton, 2012), needed a photograph of skunk-cabbage roots to include with the chapter on the plant in her book. She enlisted the help of her botanist husband, Scott Mori, to excavate the understory of a single plant. The job took three hours. Scores of pale, tapering roots radiated out from the base of the plant. The roots were marked by rings formed as the roots contracted, pulling the plant deeper into the soil. Deep roots help the skunk cabbage stay anchored in moist, rich earth.

As the spathe, its work done, begins to wither, the leaves of skunk cabbage rise and unfurl. They are nothing short of astounding. These elephant ears of green turn swampy patches of ground into what look like salads made for giants. A single leaf blade may measure a foot or more in height and sometimes two or three feet across. They’re magnificent, but not to eat. Black bears, not very discriminating when they emerge ravenous from their dens in spring, feast on skunk-cabbage leaves, but otherwise the salad has few takers. Tear or bruise a leaf, and you’ll know part of the reason. The smell suggests burning rubber. The other hurdle is the presence of calcium oxalate crystals. These burn the mouths and throats of those who get beyond the smell, but black bears tolerate them.

Despite the stink and the crystals, skunk cabbage sometimes turns up in guides to edible plants. The late, great wild-foods guru Euell Gibbons experimented with the plant and found that he could make pancakes from the dried, powdered roots. The flavor reminded him of cocoa, he said, and the result was “something special.” As for the leaves, Gibbons prepared and cooked them in various ways. All he achieved was a foul-smelling kitchen and burns to his mouth and throat.

17. ATTACK OF THE TWENTY-FOOT WILDFLOWER

Dick Beamish, founder and publisher emeritus of the newsmagazine Adirondack Explorer, reported to me that the appearance one summer in Essex, on the eastern flank of the Adirondacks, of a giant menacing wildflower reminded him of the classic horror film The Thing. Well it should have. In that 1952 film, whose full title is The Thing from Another World, the US military accidentally liberates a hostile humanoid alien from a flying saucer that has crashed at the North Pole. “The Thing,” played by James Arness, is a sort of malevolent vegetable, described at one point in the film as an “intellectual carrot.”

It’s a stretch to compare the mental capacity, if any, of any plant, giant hogweed included, to a taproot. Still, there’s no question “alien,” “hostile,” and “humanoid” all seem to fit Heracleum mantegazzianum. This dangerous, supersized Hercules of a wildflower was introduced to North America from the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian Seas. According to the polytheism of ancient Greece, it was in the Caucasus that Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a rock in punishment for giving man fire. Prometheus’s sentence included daily visits by an eagle or vulture. The bird would rip out and devour pieces of his liver—an experience perhaps not much worse than the misery inflicted today on humans by giant hogweed.

Giant hogweed can dwarf a man or woman who stands beside it. It produces leaves that sometimes measure five feet across and flowers that appear in dinner-plate-sized or larger clusters. The clusters resemble the broad, flat-topped umbels of Queen Anne’s lace. The largest specimens sprout twenty-three feet above the damp earth in which they root. Twenty-three feet! This is a plant, a poisonous plant, to be reckoned with.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Giant hogweed demands our reckoning because it suffuses all its tissues, and there are a lot of them, with a nasty chemical—an adaptation, surely, to repelling bugs and grazers. The chemical is a phototoxin called furocoumarin. On human skin it gives rise to a condition called phytophotodermatitis, a sort of horrendous sunburn that inflicts severe pain and often leaves scars. If furocoumarin gets in the eyes, it may cause temporary or permanent blindness.

According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), giant hogweed has been found, at the time of writing, two places inside the Adirondack Park: in Essex and near Old Forge in northern Herkimer County. We will serve our communities and neighbors well if we keep our eyes peeled for more. With vigilance, it’s hoped that the plant’s spreading may be checked. The task will not be easy. Giant hogweed is a weed of the first order. It spreads vegetatively through the budding of tuberous roots and sexually by circulating pollen. The seeds a single plant produces range in quantity up to about 100,000. Further complicating matters, giant hogweed is perennial. It can live for years.

Handling the Goliath is a job for professionals. However, if through accident or bad judgment any of us brushes against it or, worse, weeds it out of the yard without wearing goggles and suitable protective clothing, action can be taken to reduce the chance of suffering. The phototoxic skin response requires, as the term implies, both light and toxin. It can begin within minutes of contact. Immediate washing with soap and cold water of any skin that touched the plant are thought to help. It’s also critical to cover the possibly affected skin and make sure it receives no sun exposure for forty-eight hours. The toxin works by disabling the skin’s defenses against ultraviolet light. If you keep sun from shining on the danger zone, your chances of preventing a painful, blistering burn and subsequent scarring are good.

Should any of us spy The Thing in our midst, the thing to do is call DEC’s giant hogweed hotline at (845) 256-3111 or email details and photos to ghogweed@gw.dec.state.ny.us. For no charge, DEC will send a field crew to remove or destroy the plants. In 2008, six DEC technicians destroyed 10,558 hogweed plants. In 2009, the number of plants slain jumped to 13,354, and in 2010, as a result of 900 hotline calls and 237 reports by email, the toll reached the staggering number of 39,411. To date in New York, giant hogweed has been confined largely to the western tier, but it’s moving eastward at an ominous clip.

The most remarkable fact about giant hogweed is that it was brought to North America on purpose. It arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century. The details are uncertain. We know that gardeners of the Victorian Age on both sides of the Atlantic prized the plant’s lush foliage and grand lacy flower clusters, and bees welcomed its nectar and pollen. Today, it’s illegal to grow the stuff in England.

In North America, after its importation, giant hogweed began popping up all over. Spreading the truth about it has taken much longer. Its arrival in the Adirondacks at the dawn of the Third Millennium signals the end of an Age of Innocence.

18. LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH

Not so long ago, I was driving to Westport in the eastern Adirondacks, running late and trying to catch a southbound train when, for reasons I won’t go into, I pulled over, vaulted the guardrail, and darted into brushy woods. There, a moment later, I looked down at my feet, and there I made a notable botanical discovery. I was standing in a lush and shiny patch of poison ivy.

Like any sensible man or woman of the woods, I was wearing trousers, shoes, and socks. If I’d been in shorts, I might have been scratching skin eruptions by the time I reached Poughkeepsie.

Poison ivy is a handsome native plant, but it comes to us with an unpleasant reputation. The reputation gives rise to the plant’s genus name, Toxicodendron, which means “poison tree.” An oil produced by glands on the leaves and stems, called urushiol, inflicts a nasty, persistent dermatitis on most who touch it. Those lucky enough not to be troubled by poison ivy contact should beware. Repeated contact increases the likelihood that, one day, you’ll develop a whopper of a rash.

My North Country mother, by way of instructive example, would weed poison ivy out of our backyard without a care. Such was the case until one day, in her early sixties, she put her hands on the plant one time too many. Mom’s skin soon looked like strawberry shortcake, and the immune response went systemic, puffing up her face and nearly putting her in a hospital bed.

Poison ivy can be bad news for those who get too close, but we wouldn’t want to eradicate it at every opportunity. At least I wouldn’t, and I’ve suffered through some nasty rashes. White-tailed deer, black bears, cottontail rabbits, and muskrats eat the foliage and the vines. If you value migratory songbirds, you might want to tip your hat to poison ivy. The fruits, small white berries produced in clusters in late summer and lasting in varying degrees through the fall, contain unusually high concentrations of lipids. Plants store energy in lipids. When a red-eyed vireo or blackpoll warbler from the Adirondacks makes its annual end-of-summer flight to Brazil or thereabouts, one of the chief aviation fuels that powers its journey is poison ivy fruit. More than sixty kinds of birds are known to consume the berries.

In the higher ground of the Adirondack Mountain interior, poison ivy is scarce and entirely absent in most places. Perhaps it can’t stand the cold. In the High Peaks region, plants with poison-ivy-like three parted leaves may be Jack-in-the-pulpits, which are wildflowers in the Arum family, or trilliums. Still, if you see a plant and think it could be poison ivy, the best policy is hands-off. As an old saying advises, “Leaves of three, let it be.”

Poison ivy is a woody vine. The sturdy stems bristle with aerial roots that resemble thick (often reddish) hair, and you do well to watch out for them, too. One October day, I handled old fence posts and rails that had been salvaged from another location. There were bits and pieces of years-dead poison ivy on them. I didn’t give those botanical relics a second thought. That was my downfall. By the next morning, my hands oozed, itched, and smarted.

Because poison ivy vines growing on living or dead trees can seem to represent branches, it’s possible to touch the leaves without realizing what you’re doing, at least at first. Once I found a tree whose leaves I didn’t immediately recognize growing in a stream bed. I pulled a branch toward my face for a close look, then dropped it as if stung by a bee. Yikes! I’d mistaken a dead, skeletal tree with lush poison ivy vines growing on it for a living plant. I scrubbed my hands in sand and water from the stream, hoping to wash the stuff off. Happily, a rash never developed.

In New York State, one of the most glamorous of all plants in autumn is poison ivy’s cousin, the poison sumac. It’s a shrub that grows almost entirely in wetlands, so even where common, most people never bump into it. My friend Mark Rooks, a wetlands biologist and botanist, tells me he’s never seen poison sumac in the Adirondacks. The New York State Flora Atlas shows the plant in counties that partly fall within the Adirondack Blue Line, so it may be here somewhere. Even if it’s not, a warming climate may soon deliver it to our midst.

Should that happen, I’ll welcome it. One of the ecstatic memories of my long career as a naturalist and bird watcher dates to an October day when I bushwhacked into a remote swamp in the Hudson Valley. Suddenly I became aware of birds swirling all around me. I looked up to realize I was surrounded by poison sumac, the branches teeming with berries and warblers. Most of the warblers were American redstarts. The orange-and-black of the males combined with the brilliant scarlet of the poison sumac leaves created one of the most sumptuous displays of color my eyes have ever seen.

19. CRANBERRIES YOU HAVE KNOWN

If you were sentient and old enough to spin a record in 1967, you remember the claim that John Lennon said “I buried Paul” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a wacky theory circulated at the time. It asserted that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash, a double had taken his place, and the band was dropping hints in lyrics and on album covers. What Lennon really said, however, was “Cran . . . berry . . . sauce.” Listen closely to the last seconds of the song, and you’ll hear it.

No doubt Lennon liked cranberry sauce. Why not? America’s signature sweet-and-sour sauce has graced tables at harvest time for centuries, and the Mother Country has come to appreciate it, too.

Cranberry sauce comes, of course, from cranberries. In the Adirondacks two species grow widely, typically in peat bogs and fens and sometimes side by side. One is the small cranberry, Vaccinium oxycoccos, which Thoreau called the “sparrow egg cranberry.” In England this species is often called “fenberry.” The other is the large cranberry, V. macrocarpon, unique to North America. Large cranberry produces the big, fleshy cranberries that are sold in grocery stores. These are pressed and sweetened to make tangy, refreshing cranberry juice.

While cranberries taste nothing like blueberries or huckleberries, the plants that produce them are closely related. All are heaths, members of the botanical family Ericaceae. Other Adirondack heaths include sheep laurel, bog laurel, leatherleaf, bog rosemary, and Labrador-tea. Heaths tend to be supremely cold-hardy and able to grow in poor soils.

Late fall is a good time to go looking for wild cranberries. Get down on your knees in a boggy spot (the Boreal Life Trail at the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center has one that’s traversed by a board-walk), and look closely. With a little hunting you’ll spy delicate vines with tiny evergreen leaves. If the leaves are downright miniscule (often only a quarter inch long) and sharp-pointed, and if the fruits are speckled, you’re looking at the small cranberry. If the leaves are longer (often a half inch long or slightly more) and blunt-tipped, and if the fruits are nearly grape-sized and not speckled, you’ve discovered the large cranberry.

No one can be sure where the word cranberry comes from. The Oxford English Dictionary suspects a German source, although one widely quoted explanation, which may or may not be correct, is that it derives from “crane berry.” Borne on slender stems, cranberry blossoms have bent-back petals and exposed working parts. This gives them an ungainly look something like that of cranes and herons.

Cranberries rarely occur outside of bogs and nutrient-poor fens because they thrive where most plants can’t, in the mossy, hyper-acidic soils these environments provide. The small cranberry, which ranges like a wreath around the northerly parts of the globe, is the greater acid lover. It generally grows in peaty ground measuring between 2.9 and 3.8 on the pH scale. By contrast, large cranberry thrives best when the pH ranges between 4.8 and 6.1. Both plants depend on business partnerships with mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi tap the green plant’s supply of home-made sugar and in return supply moisture and minerals.

An array of insects eat cranberry plants, among them the cranberry spanworm, the cranberry girdler, the cranberry rootworm, and the pointed sallow caterpillar. All grow up to be moths. If you look closely at cranberry plants, you sometimes find green caterpillars feeding on the leaves. These look vaguely like slugs and are the larvae of the bog copper butterfly. Solitary bees and bumblebees are the cranberry’s chief pollinators.

In addition to Beatles and the rest of the human race, animal consumers of cranberry fruits include cranberry worms, cranberry fruit-worms, ruffed grouse, mourning doves, tree sparrows, and chipmunks. Voles attack the fruits, too. Rather than eating them, the rodents tend to cut the berries open and nip out the seeds. Piles of halved cranberries punctuate the beaten paths the industrious voles make in the moss.

The English Pilgrims who settled the Massachusetts coast in the seventeenth century were introduced to cranberries by the local Indians. The fruits are rich in Vitamin C, antioxidants, and bioflavonoids, and they make an excellent, if astringent, health food. Owing to their ability to make flesh pucker, cranberries were used to make poultices for wounds and to treat diarrhea. The juice is still prescribed to help prevent and cure urinary tract infections.

Henry David Thoreau had an abiding fondness for cranberries. He wrote in his journal on the 30th of August, 1856, “Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.”

Bon appetit!

PART SIX

THESE ARE HARD TO PIGEONHOLE

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1. DEEP WOODS LOVE TRIANGLE

The old way of looking at nature, inspired by sources as diverse as the Old Testament and Darwin’s Origin of Species, featured hard, relentless struggle. Dogs ate dogs. Wolves ate lambs. Serpents preyed on the innocent and unsuspecting. Even those paragons of peace, the towering trees and the lowly wildflowers, engaged in merciless competition with each other for moisture, minerals, and sunshine.

My, how things have changed.

Today ecologists walk into woods in the Adirondacks and elsewhere and view things in a new yet ancient light. The stories told are no longer all about competition and conflict. To the contrary, the more ecologists study the way things work in a forest, the fewer rugged individuals and lone entrepreneurial wolves they find, and the more they unearth webs of mutual support and cooperation.

To give a political analogue, instead of being the competition-dominated world envisioned by Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz, the forest, at its healthiest and most diverse, seems to be more a Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders kind of place, one of high taxes, extensive social welfare, and the widespread sharing of spoils.

To illustrate, I can think of no better example than the three-way ménage (four-way, if we include nitrogen-fixing bacteria) in which forest trees share domestic arrangements with flying squirrels and fungi.

The subject is so vast and so recently exposed to the light of day that even scientists are only beginning to comprehend it. Yet it seems to follow this rough outline.

Forest trees have enormous needs that must be satisfied by resources derived from the soil. The trees have roots, yet roots, on the whole, appear to do a better job anchoring plants than they do hauling in moisture, minerals, and nutrients. And so the trees are willing, if not consciously then biologically, to pay “taxes” in the form of photosynthesis-generated carbohydrates. Plants hand carbs over to what may well constitute the central governing body of the forest, its community of fungi. New and radical? Hardly. Fossils suggest that such interplay has been going on among conifers and fungi (today it involves other trees, too) for several hundred million years.

The threadlike hyphae of fungi that supply trees with raw materials extend into virtually every cubic centimeter of forest soil. They also penetrate the roots of the trees they serve and from which they collect tariffs. Scientists call them mycorrhizal. “Mycor” comes from the Greek word for fungus, “rhizal” from the Greek for root. Some mycorrhizal fungi produce conspicuous, stalk-and-cap reproductive bodies that we call mushrooms. Into this group fall, for example, all members of the genus Russula, at least several of which are common in the Adirondacks. Others produce subterranean reproductive structures sometimes called truffles.

In order for the truffles of a mycorrhizal fungus to disseminate spores, thereby spreading DNA far and wide and promoting a healthy population of its own kind, the fungus needs couriers. Here’s where flying squirrels come in. The truffles give off alluring scents that promise tasty meals. Most animals probably fail to detect the scents, but bucktoothed, night-gliding, bug-eyed squirrels come down out of the trees to dig for them. Biologists wondered why flying squirrels turned up often in the diets of terrestrial predators until they discovered the secret life of the rodents on the ground.

A flying squirrel with a belly full of truffles eventually scrambles up a trunk and sails off to gourmet dining, romance, and sleeping opportunities elsewhere. Meanwhile, the meal works its way through the animal’s digestive tract. When the inevitable happens, the droppings left behind distribute items important to trees, mycorrhizal fungi, and ultimately to the animals themselves.

For starters, there are the spores of the fungus, still viable after their journey. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria sail through the system, too. These nifty miracle workers were living within the fungus, taking nitrogen gas from air pockets in the soil and incorporating, or “fixing,” it into compounds the fungus and its host tree put to use. Yeast also comes along. It seems to stimulate the growth of the spores and the bacteria. Finally, fourth on the list, arrives a chemical that helps freeze-proof the spores.

The complexity of all this boggles the mind, or my mind, anyhow. I began this discussion in terms of a threesome, but as we’ve seen, bacteria and yeast form silent fourth and fifth partners. If we factor in the foxes, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and weasels that pounce on the flying squirrels while they’re gorging, the red-backed voles that also feed on the fungi, and a vast array of other organisms whose lives somehow depend for shelter or sustenance on the trees, fungi, and squirrels, the network of links begins to make our digital World Wide Web look simple by comparison.

On some days, we walk into the forest and feel, or think we feel, a soothing calm. Maybe it’s all those mutually beneficial relationships we’re sensing. I’m the last one to get New Agey about anything. But who knows?

2. WEIRD LIGHTS

By the time I was twelve, I wasn’t exactly world-weary, but I’d gained a sense that life was not entirely a bed of roses. Or, if it was a bed of roses, it was one fraught with thorns. They came in the form of cuts, bruises, bee stings, sunburns (the worst I ever had came on the Northville beach at the head of Sacandaga Lake in the Adirondacks), death (I’d lost pets), sales tax (it came along the year I turned nine), and homework. So it was a great boost to my spirit in those mind-expanding days to go into the woods and discover something utterly thrilling and magical: the bioluminescence of fungi.

My initiation into the mystery of fungal light came on a Boy Scout campout. My friend James and I had fallen into disfavor somehow with the troop elders, and as punishment, we’d been given the chore of digging a communal latrine. Aiming to do a good job, we picked a location far enough from the tenting ground to disperse fragrances and close enough to be not too hard to find in the dark.

A deep hole was dug with a folding army surplus shovel, and a seat fashioned from a branch was lashed to a pair of young trees that stood on either side of the hole. As dusk began to fall, we hurried back to join the others. It was then we made our discovery.

Rotting white birch logs were giving off light! It seemed impossible. We looked and looked again. Yes, the logs glowed! James and I were jazzed and baffled. Only weeks later in a school library did we learn what was going on. A luminescent fungus was digesting the wood and in the process giving off light. The cool green glow is known as foxfire.

More than forty years later, a mycologist friend of mine named Zaac Chavez identified the likely producer of the glow as Armillaria mellea, a fungus and parasite of living trees also known as the honey mushroom. It is not the only glow-in-the-dark fungus. The widespread bitter oyster fungus, Panellus stipticus, also bioluminesces, but its radiance is confined to its fruiting bodies, which is to say, the mushrooms themselves. With honey mushrooms, it’s not the stalks and caps that glow. It’s the mycelium. This is the actual body of the fungus, a sprawling network of threadlike structures called hyphae that secrete enzymes, penetrate wood, and digest it. Wood is made up largely of cellulose and lignin. These are complex carbohydrates that store solar energy in bonds between carbon atoms. Honey mushroom hyphae break apart those bonds, reaping a bountiful harvest of energy and emitting light in the process.

James and I could have run back to the campfire to trumpet our discovery to friends, scoutmaster, and parents, but to prolong our monopoly of the discovery, we kept the fun fungi to ourselves. At bedtime, we hauled a pile of glowing logs into our tent. Could we read by the weird and mysterious light? We aimed to find out.

We could! Without the benefit of candles, batteries, household current, or moonlight, we could just barely make out words printed on a page. We didn’t know it, but we were following in the footsteps of a Founding Father. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin solved the problem of illuminating the interior of the Turtle, the world’s first submarine to be used in combat, by bottling foxfire. The Turtle made an unsuccessful attempt to sink the British Navy’s Eagle in New York Harbor but was itself sunk shortly thereafter.

When James and I were ready to go public with our discovery, we decided on an elaborate surprise. The path to the latrine was hard to follow in the dark. We’d fix that.

Rounding up all the lengths of rotting, glowing birch we could find, we laid down a border along each side of the path. Our creation lit up the route like an airport runway. As a finishing touch, we put a luminous log across the path where it reached the hole. The idea was that nobody would take one step too far. Alas, it didn’t work, at least not entirely. The next morning we learned that during the night, a father of one of the Scouts had taken the plunge.

By the time I picked up my bugle and played taps the second night, ours was no longer the only tent illuminated by a strange blue-green light.

In the more than forty years since, I’ve seen foxfire several times in the Adirondack woods and elsewhere but never enough to rival the abundance of that first eye-opening find.

Seeing such light raises questions. How is the glow produced? Scientists tell us it arises from the chemical interplay of luciferin, a pigment, luciferase, an enzyme, and oxygen.

Why do a minority of fungi make light in this way? Scientists aren’t sure. The best ideas to date are that the light attracts insects and other small creatures, and these help spread the luminous fungus’ spores, or that the glow acts like the attention-grabbing colors of the monarch butterfly and the orange eft stage of the eastern newt, warning animals that might eat the fungus to save themselves the trouble of ingesting something that tastes bad, is poisonous, or both.

3. HARD TIMES FOR BEECHES

If you’ve walked in the Adirondack woods lately, you’ve noticed the slaughter. The American beech (Fagus grandifolia) is dying. Massive trunks, their bark as smooth and gray as elephant skin when healthy, stand pocked and festering on the stump, or worse, they sprawl on the ground, rotting.

The killers remain at large. At least one of them slipped across the Atlantic around 1890 and entered North America in the vicinity of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The other is suspected to have come along with the first as a hitchhiker. Scientists are uncertain about the details. We do know that in Canada’s Maritime Provinces, early in the twentieth century, beech trees began to sicken and die in great number.

By 1932, the year FDR was first elected president and Amelia Ear-hart flew the Atlantic, the assassins had slipped across the US border. Maine beeches were toppling.

Who are the deadly duo? Call them the Bonnie and Clyde of tree afflictions. Bonnie is a scale insect, Cryptococcus fagisuga. She’s short, slim, and plain. She exists by the million, reproducing without the help of males. In fact, there are no males. Cryptococcus, aka Bonnie, is the most militant of feminists. She’s eliminated males from her life.

Clyde is a fungus, usually but not always one known to mycologists as Nectria coccinea. When Bonnie drills feeding holes into the thin bark of beeches, Clyde’s spores go along for the ride. Inside the beech’s inner bark or phloem, they germinate, send out threadlike hyphae, and begin digesting the tissues around them.

Before you know it, the phloem can no longer do its job, which consists of providing mass transportation for sugars and other compounds produced in the leaves. If enough phloem is affected, the leaves wither. In the end the tree is choked to death.

Infected areas of trunk often exude a shapeless, rubbery-looking goo called slime flux. The slime comes out brown and turns black.

The scale insect (a tiny thing, a cousin of an aphid) lays her eggs on beech bark in July or August. The eggs hatch in late summer or fall. Out of them wriggle hordes of larvae, each with six legs. Their piercing, sucking mouthparts combine the abilities of drill bits and drinking straws.

The little Bonnies feed on sap and quickly morph into bizarre-looking second-stage larvae. These lack legs but make up for the handicap by dressing in lacy white frills of wax. In this stage, the insects pass the winter. In spring, if birds haven’t found them, the larvae make one last molt. This time they emerge as mature, self-fertile females.

Beech trees have long served as symbols of strength and endurance. They can live for centuries. They grow vigorously in all but the dimmest shade. How strange, then, to watch beeches succumb in their prime. If you love these trees as I do, it all but breaks the heart.

One day you notice white fluff covering trunks and limbs. When you return, orange-red fruiting bodies, the size of the lowercase o’s in this sentence, bulge from the smooth gray bark. White, scaly patches may also appear. Both dispense spores that spread the fungus. Finally, one day you come back to find standing skeletons, gouged by woodpeckers, or you see rotting corpses strewn over the forest floor.

A tragic twist of the beech disease story involves the tree’s means of reproduction. It produces beechnuts, which, if they’re not devoured by black bears, deer, ruffed grouse, wild turkeys, and rodents, sprout and become beech trees. Beeches also create new trees, especially when under stress, by sending up suckers or clones from their roots. New trees that develop in this fashion are part of the problem. They are genetically identical to the parent tree and thus offer no hope for disease resistance if the parent itself succumbed. Also worrying, clones tend to sprout in dense stands so shady that other species find it difficult or impossible to get started in them. Foresters sometimes refer to these suffocating thickets as “beech hell.”

In the Adirondacks, beech bark disease has been around for decades. Dave Houston, a Vermont-based forest scientist and plant pathologist who monitored study plots in the Adirondack Mountains for years, believes the plague arrived from two directions: from the east via Vermont, entering the park sometime between the late 1940s and early 1960s, and from the south via the Hudson Valley, progressing northward from Westchester County in the 1930s and the Catskills in the 1940s. Adirondack beeches began to die sometime afterward, probably in the 1950s.

Celia Evans, a professor of biology at Paul Smith’s College, once hosted a conference on beech bark disease in Saranac Lake. She hoped for a good turnout and got it. About a hundred scientists and interested individuals, Dave Houston among them, came from as far as Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, and Maryland. No participant offered solutions to the problem of saving beeches in the wild, but research findings were shared and defensive strategies discussed.

Evans secured a U.S. Department of Agriculture/U.S. Forest Service grant to study beech bark disease in depth. She and several colleagues and students will conduct work in the Adirondack woods and also in New England. “We’ll be studying places affected by the disease, and in particular looking at forests where earlier researchers have worked. We want to understand the changes,” Evans said. “Our goal is to develop management measures—ways that we can make the best of things.”

Meanwhile, despite a lot of hard work by Evans, Houston, and others, Bonnie and Clyde remain on the loose, continuing to mow down beech trees.

4. WEIRD LUMPS

For many years, I led nature walks for the Wawbeek Resort, on Upper Saranac Lake, before it closed in the fall of 2007. Not far from the lake-shore, I escorted companions into a grove of old-growth sugar maples, their trunks towering and massive like the rockets that launched astronauts to the moon. A bushel-basket-sized sphere bulged from one of the trees, and always the thing provoked questions. What was it? What created it? Will it kill the tree? Does it have a practical purpose?

Wawbeek guests were not alone in their wonder. I run a naturalist guiding business, and over the years scores of people have asked about these peculiar formations. The odd swellings occur, it’s probably safe to say, on every Adirondack acre.

Only the first question has a clear-cut answer. The tumor-like growths are burls. Burls are not galls, which are formed by plants that have been tricked by insects into producing protective swellings around their eggs. A gall-making insect (most are wasps or flies) produces a substance that mimics one of the plant’s growth hormones. It in turn stimulates the formation of the gall. Inside, the insect’s eggs hatch and develop. The gall—you notice them, for example, on certain goldenrod stalks in winter—provides the growing insects shelter and food.

A burl harbors no insects, at least none responsible for its creation. Inside the bark covering of the bulge lies wood. The wood has not been laid down in the normal way of ring upon concentric ring, but in a swirling, irregular mass. Burl comes from the Old French bourle, which refers to a knot in the fleece of a sheep.

A burl is a tumor, something like a cancer. Unlike many animal cancers, however, burls generally grow slowly and don’t kill the trees they grow on. In fact, a tree that develops such a growth, or growths, may flourish, despite the alteration of its appearance.

What causes burls? What causes cancer? Those are tricky questions. Thirty years ago, in a botany course at Middlebury College, I learned that a variety of infectious agents provoke burl growth, among them viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Vague? Of course. When the words left the professor’s lips, he looked like someone who was walking on thin ice and knew it.

Decades have passed. Surely an internet search on “burl” would tell me all I wanted to know. So I hit the send button and awaited enlightenment.

As it turned out, little was to be had. So I changed tack. I took my questions straight to a renowned expert who had been recommended to me: George Hudler, chairman of the department of plant pathology at Cornell University. Surely Hudler, if he could spare the time, would bring me up to speed on burls.

The good doctor responded swiftly and generously. “I wish I could provide the answers you are seeking,” he began his email, then explained why he could not. Burls, he explained, raise more questions than answers. Some may be instigated by “a fungus in the genus Phomopsis,” said Hudler, “but I don’t think the evidence is very strong, and I really thing that the Phomopsis diagnosis has become more of a convenient ‘out’ for people who don’t know any more than we do but want to leave some kind of answer as they depart.”

Burls, Hudler said, can be divided into three general categories. First are those that occur in number on one tree, but don’t occur on other nearby trees. Second are ones that occur again and again on a given species in a particular area, such as the sometimes basketball-sized burls of wild black cherry. (These, Hudler said, are one of the few burls whose cause is known. It’s a bacterium, and the disease it causes is known as “black knot.”) Third, there are single burls. You find these in one place on a single tree.

What purpose do burls serve to the pathogens, if any, that spark their creation? None, at least as far as we know.

Which doesn’t mean that burls aren’t useful. Woodturners and furniture makers love them, and their limited supply makes them valuable. “Finding out how to make burls could be a lucrative discovery,” wrote Hudler.

Ken Gadway, a familiar figure at Adirondack craft fairs and farmers’ markets, makes much of his living from burls. He knows no more than Hudler about cause. Effect is his specialty. Preparing for a productive winter at his lathe, Gadway, when I spoke with him by telephone, had accumulated “150 or so” burls that he would spin and shape into bowls. Customers love burl bowls, he said, because the color and grain of each one is startling and unique.

I’d often wondered how woodturners acquire burls, so I asked Gadway. It turned out he doesn’t roam the woods with a chainsaw, as I’d imagined he might, finding sick trees and surgically excising their tumors. He buys burls from loggers and sawmills.

“Burl wood is special,” Gadway told me. “It’s good stuff.” “The Adirondack Woodturner,” as he calls himself, had found burls on black cherry, yellow birch, sugar maple, white ash, hop hornbeam, red oak, American beech, white cedar, white pine, and red spruce.

Although Gadway probably knows more about burls than just about anyone, at least when it comes to putting them to practical use, even he finds them mysterious. “No two are alike,” he said. “Cutting into a burl is like opening a Christmas present—you have no idea what color and grain you’ll find.”

5. THE SNOWMAKERS

Have you ever, as I have and as most Adirondack kids have, stuck out your tongue on a snowy day and let ice crystals alight on your tongue? There they tickle, there they melt, and there they often provoke a smile. Would you feel the same way if you knew that snow crystals are often vehicles for airborne bacteria, microorganisms that instigate the formation of snowflakes and ride them from high in the sky to low down on the ground, and some of them may infect and destroy hosts? The thought is enough to give a snow-taster pause.

Happily, you can probably rest easy. The chief bacterium implicated in snow formation is a species without a common name, known to scientists as Pseudomonas syringae. Varieties of it infect maples, crabapples, wheat, grasses of the genus Panicum, lilacs, cherries, tomatoes, and more. A closely related species causes cankers on ash trees. None is known to trouble humans.

The science of “bioprecipitation,” as it’s called, is only a few decades old. A pioneer was David Sands, a biologist at Montana State University in Bozeman. First by studying hailstones, and later by examining samples of snow, hail, and rain from North America, Europe, and Antarctica, Sands and colleagues found that the nucleating agents that provoke ice crystals and raindrops to form are often not dust particles, as was long believed. They are often living things or their by-products. Hailstones, for example, generally contain high concentrations of bacteria in their cores. Yet bacteria aren’t the whole story. Nucleating agents involved in the formation of snow and rain include fungi and algae, too.

Most of us think of life as chiefly inhabiting the surface of the land and the surface down to the inky depths of the sea. Birds and bats make forays into the sky, and moles, earthworms, and spadefoot toads live mostly in the ground. That’s about the beginning and the end of it—at least as most of us view the world. But to paraphrase Bob Dylan, the paradigms they are a-changing. In recent decades scientists have learned that bacteria and hardy bacteria-like organisms called archaeans flourish in vast diversity and quantity deep in the earth’s crust. And we’re fast learning that there’s far more to the atmosphere than air.

It boggles the mind to think of a microorganism, a bacterium, manipulating the atmosphere and the earth’s water cycle to its own advantage. Yet that seems to be what goes on. Winds whisk Pseudomonas syringae off of host plants. The details are yet to be fully explained. It seems that forest canopies serve the hitchhikers as major pickup points. Once the bacteria are airborne, their ability to spur the formation of ice crystals and raindrops assures them dispersal to new territories and rides back to earth.

Pseudomonas has been shown to play a major role in snow formation all over the world. It does so even in skies over Antarctica, a continent with few plants.

How does a bacterium provoke the creation of a snowflake? The trick seems to lie in compounds called “ina” proteins, which are produced on Pseudomonas’s outer membrane. (“Ina” stands for ice nucleation-active.) These biochemicals likely evolved as an indirect but effective means of penetrating host plants. During frosts, ice generally forms inside plants at temperatures well below freezing. In the presence of ice-nucleating proteins, however, ice crystallizes at warmer temperatures than might otherwise be the case. Sharp, jagged crystals damage the cell walls of plants. Piercings allow bacteria, propelled by flagella similar to those of sperm, to swim into living plant cells. There they feast, manufacture more of themselves, and cause cell death.

The same talent for spurring ice crystals to form on and in plants on frosty nights serves Pseudomonas well as it journeys through the atmosphere. The precise degree to which this and other living organisms cause precipitation of moisture from the sky is unknown, but a growing body of evidence suggests they are major players.

Brent Christner, a biologist at Louisiana State University, examined melted snow collected in the Yukon, Montana, France, and Antarctica. He and his colleagues found that of the ice nucleators (as they’re called) found in the samples, between 69 and 100 percent were living or formerly living organisms. In another study, air samples from two cities in Texas were found to contain bacteria of at least 1,800 species. It turns out that the atmosphere, like the sea, the soil, and virtually every surface in every landscape, teems with living things.

The study of bioprecipitation has practical as well as purely intellectual value. Snowmaking machines, especially ones used not far below the freezing point, use water and energy more efficiently if nucleators are added to the recipe. Ina proteins produced by Pseudomonas are the usual nucleators of choice. Ski resorts buy the stuff under a variety of trade names. One is SnowMax Snow Inducer. When I was working on this story, Jon Lundin, a spokesman for the Olympic Regional Development Authority, told me that ina proteins were not used in snowmaking on Whiteface, the biggest ski mountain in the Adirondacks. He added that ina proteins are widely used by snowmakers in the West.

Should we fear rain and discourage our kids from sticking their tongues out when it’s snowing? Probably not. No evidence has been found to suggest there are biological threats to humans in precipitation. In fact, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe we should hail and celebrate Pseudomonas and its fellow ice-nucleating organisms. Without them we would surely receive a lot less life-giving, recreation-sustaining rain and snow from above.

PART SEVEN

FOR LAUGHS AND ILLUMINATION

Wikimedia Commons.

1. AND NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH!

Somewhere in the not-too-distant future, somewhere within the bounds of the park, the following remarks are delivered by the chairman of the Adirondack Park Agency to a crowd of thousands.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Honorable Senators and Representatives, Governor Hochul, Other Elected Officials, and Members of the News Media: It is with great pleasure and humility that I welcome you here today to the Adirondack Park’s first designated Pleistocene wildlife zone. This is a historic occasion.

Some of you are old enough to remember the controversy in the late twentieth century regarding the proposed reintroduction to the Adirondack Mountains of wolves. Advocates argued that the predators would help thin our burgeoning moose and deer herds. Others cried foul, claiming that wolves would pose grave danger to children, the elderly, free-range Siamese cats, and poodles. Within their ranks, proponents could not agree on which species, or subspecies, of top dog belonged here: the gray, the red, or the Algonquin tweed. Yet great as the clamor was then, it seems but a whisper now beside the uproar we’ve heard these last twelve months.

Years hence, long after the fuss has died down, we will look back on this day with pride. For the first time in more than 10,000 years, woolly mammoths will again roam—and groom—our fields, meadows, and marshes. The six female mammoths and four males we liberate today represent both a great leap forward to a biologically rejuvenated future and a bold step backward to a storied past. Humans helped drive the mammoth to extinction. Humans now right an ancient wrong.

Behold, my friends, alive, bursting with get-up-and-go, ready to bring their millstone-like molars to bear on Adirondack grasses, sedges, and rushes, Mammathus primigenius, the woolly mammoth! [At this point, town supervisors from throughout the region pull cords, raising a giant curtain. A great communal gasp rises up from the crowd. Ten very shaggy, elephant-like animals with long twisting tusks and high-domed heads are revealed.] These animals average six tons apiece. Each stands more than ten feet tall at the shoulder. Has anyone here ever seen such Steinway-quality ivory? The tusks measure a dozen feet now from root to tip and may eventually extend sixteen feet or more.

Let me briefly review for you the hard work and research that brings us to this day of celebration. By the late twentieth century, it became possible for scientists to sequence the genomes of animals, even extinct ones. In 2005, the United States Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute announced it had assembled the full gene sequence of the cave bear, made famous by Jean Auel in her Ice Age novels. The feat was accomplished using bone samples from two cave bears that had been dead 40,000 years.

With the woolly mammoth, the job proved easier. Thanks in part to global warming, a frozen mammoth emerges every few years from Siberian permafrost. Several of these provided the tissues that allowed scientists to sequence the woolly mammoth’s genes. The work proved, as had been long suspected, the close kinship between it and the Asian elephant.

Attempts were made to extract frozen 20,000-year-old sperm from the carcasses of male mammoths, select out the gametes still viable, and use them to inseminate Asian elephant females. A generation of hybrids would thus be produced. Then, once the hybrids reached breeding age in ten years or so, they’d be backcrossed, again and again, yielding, in the fullness of time, a fraction of pure woolly mammoth.

It was a promising approach, and results may yet be achieved. But in the meantime the effort was eclipsed by the same fast-track technology that produced the celebrated cloned sheep known as Dolly. Re-sequenced mammoth DNA was injected into Asian elephant zygotes whose chromosomes had been extracted. Voilà! The results stand before you.

Critics assert, fairly, I admit, that the remains of not a single Ice Age mammal in the Adirondack region has been found. Imagine, however, what treasures lie deep in our bogs, tucked in soft peat, hidden from scavengers, protected from the ravages of weather, and preserved by high acidity and an absence of bacteria. Elsewhere in the Empire State, evidence exists of the presence of the woolly mammoth, the Jefferson’s mammoth (a somewhat larger and more southerly species or subspecies named for Thomas Jefferson), the American mastodon, and the once widespread bird today known as the California condor, to cite examples. No serious mammalogist or paleoecologist would question the woolly mammoth’s former presence here. Indeed, wandering bands of Paleo Indian hunters and elephant-like animals very likely coexisted in these mountains for several thousand years.

Why restore the mammoth? A feasibility study conducted by the APA showed that tourists will pay more to see live woolly mammoths grazing beside Routes 3, 28, and 30 than they currently spend on snowmobiling, downhill skiing, fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and leaf-peeping combined. Indeed, if these giants prove as suitable for human transport as their short-haired Asian cousins, snowmobiling and skiing in the Adirondacks may well give way to mammoth riding.

Where from here? Despite howls of protest, we are looking into bringing back other Pleistocene species. Imagine, if you will, the return of the dire wolf, the giant beaver, the giant ground sloth, the mastodon, and the condor. Imagine the tourists who will throng to see them. Think of the hunting and the fertilizer. And of course, drive slowly at night.

And so, friends, we put aside our differences and welcome a living emblem of past and future, the Adirondack woolly mammoth. Watch it mow the grass along our roadsides, shovel snow with its prodigious tusks, and make tracks across a meadow near you. [Applause follows.]

2. ANIMAL HOUSE

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

In brief, I explained who I was: a nosy Adirondack nature writer hoping to scoop competitors with a first-ever visit to a beaver lodge. It would be a tight squeeze, but I was determined.

“What’s in it for us?”

Anticipating the question, I’d arrived with a load of aspen in my old-style black ash pack basket. This, I knew, was a treat the beavers couldn’t resist. Sometimes a writer who wants to crawl into a small hole has got to lower his standards.

“All right,” said the beaver, eyeing the twigs.

There was no getting around it. To enter the lodge in winter, I knew I’d have to either dig my way in with a backhoe or slip in beaver-style. So I zipped myself into a wetsuit. A spot of water had opened along the shoreline on a sunny day. Soon I was darting in, stroking through the icy water, and plunging under the lodge. I feared the portal to the interior might prove hard to find, but a flickering blue light emanating from it made the job easy.

Up I popped, up into the beavers’ lodge. I’d seen my share of world-class Adirondack architecture, from Marjorie Post’s Topridge to Bill Rockefeller’s Camp Wonundra to the magnificent new Lake Placid Lodge, but this was rustic at the extreme. Every structural member in the vaulted ceiling and every ornamental embellishment had been shaped by the carpenter’s own teeth. Mud for the stucco had been carried one jowly mouthful at a time.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

“Cop a squat,” said the beaver. “Grab yourself an Ubu.” If the Lake Placid brewery’s signature brew was good enough for President Clinton when he visited and a favorite of the world’s second-largest rodent, it would do the trick for me. Bottles bobbed like buoys in an opening in the lodge floor. “We got the idea from Greenie,” said a second beaver, appearing out of the shadows. Greenie Chase was a distinguished Adirondack wildlife biologist remembered for many things, among them the grin on his face when retrieving cold bottles of ale or lager from remote backwoods stashes.

“Who’s the dude?” said a third beaver. This one was a little smaller than the others and wet behind the ears.

“Be respectful of the journalist, Junior,” said a fourth beaver, suddenly looming behind the third. I guessed this one, round in the middle, weighed about as much as a bag of concrete.

“This place is getting crowded. How many of you are there, anyhow?” I said, notebook and pencil in hand.

“Five hungry kids and two exhausted parents,” said a big beaver that one of the smaller ones called “Ma.” She cleared her throat. “Make that one exhausted parent,” she said. “Deadbeat Dad over there spends the winter watching football.” That explained the flickering blue light and the satellite dish I’d seen outside.

“Quiet!” snarled the Old Man, who’d ignored me until now. “Fourth quarter, two minutes to go. Packers are up by a hair and the Giants have a first down.”

“Why the Giants?” I asked. This was a New York State beaver lodge, but as far as I know, beavers don’t do anything, including picking football teams, without a reason.

“We’re New York’s official state mammal,” said the beaver. “Simple as that. Jets are all right, too. Green Bay’s in Wisconsin. Great beaver state, but the state mammal is the badger. That’s unforgivable.”

“OK. You watch TV. But what else do you do in here to pass the long winter?”

“Sleep,” chirped one eager beaver.

“Eat,” said Ma. “These kids eat us out of house and home.” She wasn’t kidding. Just then, one of Ma’s offspring yanked a twig from one of the walls and started gnawing on it. Another had snatched up my pencil and begun to chew off the point. A third was tasting my pack basket.

Baring her big armor-plated incisors, Ma turned to Pa. “Your turn to make a food run,” she said. “Game’s over. Get cracking.”

The lumbering movement of the father beaver out of his mud chair, across the eighteen-foot span of the room, and down into the icy deep could hardly be described as “cracking,” but the big fellow did as instructed. I asked Ma where he was heading. “See for yourself,” she barked.

I stammered something about lacking an air tank and regulator, but Ma curled her lip. “Do I look like Jacques Cousteau?” I took her point. In I slipped and down I swam, down to the muddy bottom where Pa was wrenching branches from a cache the family had stuck in the mud the previous summer and fall. Beavers can’t eat while submerged. Pa hauled his booty back toward the surface. At the lodge door, the whole family awaited the delivery.

Ma sat down on a hibernating snapping turtle that was passing the winter in the lodge. “Join us,” she said. But I politely declined. I didn’t have the teeth for it and knew, too, that my intestines lacked the oversized cecum full of friendly bacteria and fungi that help beavers break down cellulose. Eating aspen would have given me a bellyache and worse.

“Gotta go,” I said. I turned my back on the postgame show and headed home for a warm, dry supper.

3. GIANT BEAVERS

When the first humans arrived in the Adirondack Mountains some 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, they all but surely found the postglacial landscape populated by great fleshy beasts. Among them would have been two species of elephant (the woolly mammoth, Mammathus primigenius, and the American mastodon, Mammut americanum), plus the giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis. Known from skeletal remains unearthed elsewhere, giant beavers weighed 200 pounds or more and approximated the length and girth of small to medium sized black bears. A cousin of the modern beaver, the giant beaver has likely been extinct for 10,000 years.

Or has it?

While my friend Josh Clement and I were producing a mockumentary about extant Adirondack giant beavers for our video series Curiously Adirondack, I was rummaging the internet for background when to my astonishment I came upon contemporary reports of giant beavers. There are believers convinced the animal still exists, and they’ve seen it, or think they have, from Manitoba to Florida. One recent sighting was described on the website FrontiersofZoology.blogspot.com. It tells of a massive rodent observed swimming in the Black River in the western Adirondacks.

No date was given for the sighting. According to details given on the site, the animal was fifteen feet long, brown (a fitting shade for any beaver’s wardrobe), and had “round black eyes the size of silver dollars.” To borrow an expression my daughter used often about age twelve, “How about that?”

A June 14, 2015, post on another website, CryptozoologyNews.com (cryptozoology might be described as the study of hidden animals that may or may not exist), supplied news from Maine. A man claimed seeing a giant beaver some thirty years ago, the precise spot not divulged. He described an animal about fourteen feet in length and weighing around 350 pounds.

Another report, posted on the same site as the Black River beaver, described a “sighting” at an unnamed location in Minnesota. This particular beaver was gauged to stretch five or six feet, plus tail, and weigh on the order of 200 pounds. A really big North American beaver, the inarguably extant species we see today in the Adirondacks, might stretch fifty inches or so and weigh 115 pounds.

What to make of all this?

Having spent the last forty years working as a naturalist, park ranger, and nature writer, and having had extraordinary wildlife sightings reported to me on dozens of occasions, and having been able to investigate about a third of those sightings (often because it was quitting time or lunchtime, and I could race off to see the thing for myself), I have learned that we often see what we want to see, or what we fear to see. When I worked in the lower Hudson Valley, copper-colored snakes with bronze hourglass-shaped saddles running down their backs described over the phone or in person typically turned out to be garter snakes, striped and green, or hognose snakes. Only once did I investigate a sighting to find a serpent matching its telephone description, a real, live, venomous copperhead. On one occasion an educated and thoughtful woman described a coyote carcass over the phone to me in great detail. When I arrived at her house, I found a decomposing raccoon.

When we glimpse wild animals we rarely meet, it’s challenging in the midst of our excitement to remain fully rational. Mind you, this capability for exaggeration or downright imagining things is not limited to the young, the ignorant, or the poorly educated. I always chuckle when someone tries to convince me of the veracity of the latest Adirondack cougar report by insisting that the observer worked for the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Adirondack Park Agency, or The Nature Conservancy. With due respect to my esteemed colleagues at these institutions, we are all capable of making more of what we see than is actually there. A majority of the unlikely reports that have reached my ears over the years have originated with experienced outdoorspeople, many of them holding advanced degrees. Anyone can juice up a sighting.

Which is not to say that the person who claims to have seen an Adirondack cougar, even though scientific evidence points overwhelmingly toward there not being a population here, or someone who asserts they’ve spotted a giant beaver, could not have seen one. We have DNA evidence to prove that at least one apparently healthy mountain lion wandered eastward 1,500 miles from South Dakota en route to a fatal encounter with a car in Connecticut. And while no believer at this point can prove the continued existence of the giant beaver, in the Adirondacks or elsewhere, skeptics like me can’t disprove it, either.

So keep your eyes peeled. When near water, look for a massive hairy beast, dark brown, more or less the size of a black bear. Don’t expect to see a wide flat tail suggestive of the business end of a tennis racket. The remains of giant beavers found in Ohio and elsewhere reveal that the creature had, or has, a rounded tail. The lodge? Surely enormous and sturdy, built without respect for building codes. The dam? Studies of the teeth of genuine giant beaver remains suggest that the animal may not have felled trees and built rustic barriers to flowing water.

If they’re out there, we’ll find them.

4. A NIGHT DRIVE TO REMEMBER

A snow squall nearly blinded me as I drove south on Route 30 one wintry night. Just beyond Tupper Lake, I hit a patch of ice. The car spun.

When it came to rest, the vehicle and I were still upright and still aiming toward Long Lake. At first, nothing seemed amiss. Then I noticed something odd. The date on my digital wristwatch read 10,000 BC.

Shrugging this off, I resumed the drive. A few miles ahead, the road broke out of the woods and into the open. Wind hammered the car. Ahead I spied huge animals of some sort, their hulking shapes white with snow. They moved awkwardly, some on the road, some off of it. Although the creatures looked a bit like bears, it was plain they weren’t. The front legs were grossly oversized, the snouts too blunt, the hair too shaggy. And they were enormous, each animal stretching eight or nine feet long.

The skid on the ice had somehow shifted me to the Pleistocene. Extinct animals were alive again. These were giant ground sloths! I guessed they were Megalonyx jeffersonii, named in part for Thomas Jefferson, our first and only paleontologist-in-chief.

Lumbering along in what seemed to be infinite leisure, the sloths bent over from time to time to snatch up herbs, shrubs, and other formerly green things that stuck up from snow along the shoulder. Otherwise the animals just stood there looking clueless, blinking in the headlights.

I had to get going. Slipping past the sloths, I’d just gotten up to speed again when my high beams illuminated a new set of animals. These looked like elephants with long hair. What a night! I punched the brakes.

The woolly pachyderms ambled across the road, about a dozen of them. I had a dinner engagement with an old friend at a hotel in Long Lake, and if Long Lake was still there, I feared I’d be late. Still, all I could do was hit the brakes and gawk.

Mammoths or mastodons? I looked at the tusks. The oversized teeth extended only a few feet beyond the jowls, too short for those of mammoths. Mammoth tusks were—or are—much longer, and they curl toward each other. So these animals were mastodons. Each stood a little less than eight feet at the shoulder and weighed—I’m guessing—about five tons apiece.

Mastodons were browsers, feeding mainly on the leaves, buds, and twigs of forest trees and shrubs rather than on roadside wildflowers. In no time these cleared off the road and vanished into woods on the far side. I got going again, running a slalom course through steaming piles of dung.

No sooner did the mastodons yield the road than a herd of larger and even hairier elephants blocked my way. These shuffled about, sweeping aside snow with extravagant curving tusks and chomping on grasses and sedges along the shoulder. Woolly mammoths!

Each mammoth towered over the car. The height of the brutes at the shoulder ranged from about nine to eleven feet. I guessed their weights at five or six tons. The ears were short and well-furred, and on the tops of their heads they wore hat-like lumps. Altogether, the herd suggested a convention of well-fed Shriners.

I’d had my fill and was just about to ease through the mammoth herd when a pack of wolves turned up. They looked like gray wolves but were more powerfully built. Dire wolves! My naturalist friend Peter O’Shea would never believe me when I told him what I’d seen. The wolves aimed their muzzles skyward and howled. They sounded like police sirens.

Things got scary. The largest of the carnivores jumped on the hood of the car, dimpling the steel. Suddenly, separated only by thin easily fractured automotive glass we were eye to eye. Saliva dribbled from the corners of the dire wolf’s mouth. Now I knew how the sloths felt. What to do? I remembered the horn. A quick blast, and my hood ornament and its companions turned tail and bolted.

I had just about made up my mind to turn and go home, or try to, when a beaver the size of a black bear hauled itself onto the shoulder. I was admiring it when a huge cat (one day it will be known as Smilodon fatalis) hurled itself onto the beaver’s back. The cat weighed 500 pounds easy and had saber-like canines eleven inches long. It was about to plunge its sabers into one of the beaver’s carotid arteries when I spun the wheel and hit the gas.

The drive back to Tupper brought no more sightings. Pulling into a gas station and buying a coffee to chase away the chill and disbelief, I looked at my watch. The year now read “2021.”

Was the night’s adventure a dream? I took out my phone and punched in a number. As my Long Lake friend spoke, I heard a commotion in the background. “Just as well you couldn’t make it,” he said. “The place is full of rowdies. They’re dressed in animal hides, they speak gibberish, I think it’s been years since these guys have had a shower, and every one is carrying a spear.”

5. THINGS THAT ARRRRRGH AND GURGLE IN THE NIGHT

One black moonless night, snug in warm sleeping bags, the brave young woman who would become my wife and I were falling asleep when shocking things began to happen in the woods. We couldn’t see a thing. The experience was purely aural. First there was silence. Then came a long, loud, mournful wail that took our romantic serenity and ripped it to pieces.

Screams followed the wail. They came from several directions. Our blood didn’t curdle, yet the sounds had a human quality that gave us the creeps. Some sounded like the cries of a baby, a very unhappy baby, a baby in terrible distress. Others seemed the utterances of an adult in great pain.

“What on earth?” said Debbie, or something to that effect. Many of us react this way. We step out the door on an Adirondack winter night, or go for a country ski by moonlight, or huddle in a tent or lean-to, and wonder: Who or what makes those horrible noises?

As Debbie sat up, now on a state of high alert, I started to laugh.

“Barred owls,” I said. So they were. Next the birds—there were at least two of them—ceased their screaming and proceeded to hoo-hoo-hee-hee like chimpanzees. Finally they hooted their trademark “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” song. This reinforced my claim that laughter was justified. Instead of psychopaths in the nearby woods, we were hearing birds with peculiar things to say.

Julio de la Torre, author of the excellent Owls: Their Life and Behavior (Crown, 1990), gives a particularly vivid sense of the barred owl’s unsettling utterances. “Starting out from a complete standstill, bio-acoustically speaking,” he writes, “the barred owl will utter a long, loud, blood-curdling scream that sounds as if a human were being skewered with a red-hot iron.”

There is another source of gruesome, agonized sounds that is not a bird. This animal tends to breed in the dead of winter and send shivers down our spines in the night. Its voice, writes D. Andrew Saunders in Adirondack Mammals (Syracuse University Press, 1989), includes “squeals, screams, howls, yowls, hisses, and spits.”

If you’ve ever heard hormone-inflamed tomcats squabbling over an ovulating female, the hisses and spits Saunders describes point you in the right direction. The beast making the broadcast is a widespread but rarely seen prowler of our woods and fields. It’s a bobcat.

Thoreau in his journal gives a good secondhand report of bobcat vocalizations. As luck has it, there’s an Adirondack Mountain connection. A neighbor of Thoreau’s, a man named Skinner, was “going down to Walden in the evening” with a companion “when they heard this sound, which his companion at first thought [was] made by a coon. But S. said no, it was a wildcat. He says he has heard them often in the Adirondack region.” Skinner told Thoreau the bobcat sounded “somewhat like the domestic cat, a low sort of growling and then a sudden quick-repeated caterwaul, or yow yow yow or yang yang yang.” As far as I can tell from scrutinizing his journal, Thoreau never heard the sound himself.

A perplexing thing about terrifying sounds heard in the woods at night is that often we have no chance to see the creature that’s making them. The night Debbie and I heard the barred owls, we were lucky. I called them into flashlight range with a crude imitation, and we had a reassuring look. But that kind of good fortune is the exception, not the rule.

More typical are occasions like the one on which I heard screams coming from right outside the house I was living in at the time. This was in the middle of a big, wild county park in the Hudson Valley. Of all the night sounds I’ve heard, these were the most unnerving. It was as if something was being eaten alive, something that was gargling its own blood in the course of final futile attempts to breathe.

I grabbed a light and ran outside. The sounds stopped. I saw nothing. I looped the house in widening circles but found no predator, no prey, no lovesick bobcats, no owls, no blood and entrails, no anything. If a murder had been committed, it left no trace. This was February, as I recall, prime breeding time for bobcats. That’s probably what I heard. The sounds seemed terrestrial in origin, not coming from up in a tree. But who knows?

Even more mysterious than the “whats” of such nocturnal performances are the “whys.” Why are bobcats driven to shrill heights of cacophony when reproductive hormones spike in their bloodstreams? Are screams a turn-on for prospective mates, or are they aimed at intimidating rival suitors? The evidence, as far as I can tell, is inconclusive, partly because bobcats are elusive and difficult to observe going about their business.

As for barred owls, their high-volume, high-energy campaigns of terror likely have adaptive value. Loud cries may serve to repel rival owls and help resident birds defend a breeding and feeding territory. They may also disorient prey. The first time I heard a barred owl at its terrifying best, I was alone and stopped dead in my tracks. If a mouse, vole, or squirrel had the same reaction, the owl might have flown back to its roost that night well paid for its performance.

6. A BULLFROG’S BIG APPETITE

“Jug-o-rum,” a voice boomed from somewhere. I jumped. As far as I knew, I stood alone. Weller Pond, an appendix of cool green water and lily pads bulging from the northern reach of Middle Saranac Lake, spread out before me. To reach the spot, I’d beached a canoe at the head of Saginaw Bay, on Upper Saranac Lake, and hiked through hemlock woods up and over a saddle and down to Weller. As far as I knew, I was the only sentient being for miles.

Yet the voice spoke again. “Jug-o-rum,” it said in a deep, rich bass. “Jug-o-rum.” Now it clicked. This was a bullfrog. There was something uncanny about its voice. This member of the tribe sounded as if it was speaking the King’s English, asking for a jug of rum I didn’t have.

“Hello? Someone there?”

“Jug-o-rum,” said the bullfrog. “I’m here. Obvious, isn’t it? This is my pond. Leave it, now.” The frog spoke with a lisp. The speech impediment was surely a consequence of the amphibian having a long, sticky tongue attached at the front of its mouth rather than at the back.

I defended my presence by giving an off-the-cuff speech about state ownership of the place, invoking at one point the “forever wild” clause of the New York State Constitution. Meanwhile I could see that the frog, whose ears were marked by taut round membranes just behind its eyes, wasn’t paying attention. So I changed tack. “I’m a seventh-generation Adirondacker,” I stammered. “I have as much right to be here as you do.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said the frog. “Your pedigree in these mountains is a joke. My kind have been demanding jugs-of-rum from passersby on Adirondack lakes and ponds for thousands of generations—millions, maybe. We were here before the Ice Age came. After the ice melted, we hopped back.”

While the frog spoke, a bird flitted into a patch of arrowwood at the water’s edge and caught my eye. It was a common yellowthroat, a kind of wood-warbler. Tiny but handsomely marked, it had a luminous yellow breast and a rakish black mask. A bold gray line ran along the upper edge of the mask, making it appear all the blacker. “Gorgeous,” I said.

“Tasty, too,” said the bullfrog, its tongue flashing out like a lasso. In an instant, the bird flew down the amphibian’s gaping maw. The action was over so quickly I barely saw it happen. One moment the bird was plucking up an insect near the water’s edge, and the next it was lunch.

“Impressive,” I said. “A frog that eats birds!”

“That’s nothing,” said the frog, which was larger than one of my extra-large hands. “That bird weighed half an ounce, not even. I exceed a pound. The poor thing was merely a snack. You should have seen the garter snake I swallowed a half hour ago. Now that was a mouthful. Took several minutes for me to get all of it down. Oh, how they tickle!”

I didn’t let on that I’d eaten snakes—once a cottonmouth, once an eastern diamondback rattlesnake—years ago when I worked as a national park ranger down south. One of those snakes was a roadkill, the other bludgeoned by a camper. My roommate Steve and I had peeled, chopped, and shake-and-baked both of them. They were good eating. Yet even we hadn’t swallowed a snake whole.

“What next?” I asked.

“If I had my druthers, I’d round out my day with that big green frog over there,” the bullfrog said. “Then I’d wash it down with a jug-o-rum, jug-o-rum, jug-o-rum.”

I turned my gaze. There sat a kind of frog called a green frog, hefty for its species, four inches to the bullfrog’s six. Even I thought it looked appetizing. During my youth, I caught, dispatched, and consumed the legs of scores of Adirondack and lower Oswegatchie frogs, fried by my grandmother for breakfast.

The green frog swam toward the bullfrog, unaware of the fate it was tempting. When the smaller frog was within inches of the larger, the Jaws theme song played in my head. Suddenly there was a lunge and a splash.

The green frog wasn’t gone. The bullfrog had only managed to nab it by the snout. I might have wondered if this would be a stand-off, but I’d witnessed a bullfrog conquering a large green frog in just this way once before. The experience had taught me something of the ambition and tenacity of bullfrogs. First one of the green frog’s legs had disappeared into the great unforgiving esophagus, then another, then one long muscular hindleg, then the other. In the end the bullfrog was able to swallow all of the green frog except a single toe. It stuck out of the bullfrog’s mouth like a crooked and rubbery toothpick.

“Jug-o-rum,” said the bullfrog, its voice muffled now by the presence of a frog in its throat. “Jug-o-rum.” The bullfrog kicked out with powerful hind legs and swam into deeper water. A half hour later it remained there, digesting its bounty, looking like an overinflated balloon as I started back toward Saginaw Bay.

7. IF LICHENS COULD TALK

Just the other day I was passing a boulder the size of a railroad car, one not smooth and bare as some are but scabby with lichen, when a high-pitched sound made me jump. It sounded as if the rock was leaking air. “Psssssst!”

The voice persisted. “Hey, don’t be dense, mister. This Adirondack glacial erratic I’m growing on has more than enough to go around. Listen, it’s me, the lichen, talking.”

“Don’t believe him,” said a second voice, this one an octave higher and cross. “He’s not the lichen. He’s the fungus that provides most of the body of the lichen, so he thinks he’s the whole shebang. We’ve put up with this arrogance for an eternity almost. Oh, and by the way, he’s not really a he. He’s a she, too.”

“OK,” I said, recognizing an opportunity for a little trailside reporting. “Let’s sort this out. We’ve established that one of you, a fungus, makes up the body of this lichen I’m looking at. I’ve got to tell you. It’s impressive.” So it was. I’d never flatter a lichen without meaning every word. This thing covered an area of the boulder’s surface as large as the average Persian carpet. It wasn’t as handsome as a Persian carpet, but I had to give it credit. It was leafy and lush. The lichen spruced up the boulder considerably. In my salad days, I learned to call lichens of this general sort “rock tripe.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” said the lower voice.

“What about me?” piped the higher. “I give this lichen its sheen of green. Stand here in a downpour, and I’ll turn old fungus here as green as Ireland. I can crank out chlorophyll like there’s no tomorrow.”

“And who, may I ask, are you?” I figured I’d better get names in case I wrote this up. Without names, who would believe me?

“He’s the mycobiont, a kind of sac fungus. I’m the photobiont,” said the high voice.

“The what?”

“The photobiont, the component of a lichen that does all the real work. With chlorophyll in my cells, I’m green. I capture sunshine and use the energy in it to glue together carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. In short, I make sugar. This superorganism of ours would be nowhere without me. I make it go.”

“I still don’t get it,” I confessed. “Sure, you’re a photobiont. I get the general idea. But what are you, really? Another kind of fungus?”

“Oh, heavens no! I’m not one of them. I’m an alga.”

“I thought it was algae, to rhyme with bee?”

“That’s plural, mister. I’m just one species, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m getting it,” I said, feeling that maybe I was. “Let’s see if I have this straight. The rock tripe I’m looking at is made up mostly of the cells of a fungus.”

“Damn right,” said the low voice.

“And the greenish tint, which will become a lot more than just a tint when it rains, comes from an alga. That’s pretty much the whole story, right? I learned this in school long ago. A lichen is a partnership between a fungus and an algae—er, an alga.”

“Not so fast,” squeaked the alga. “As much as I wish every lichen had an alga in it, I cannot tell a lie. Not all do. The photobiont in some lichens is a cyanobacterium. In school, you might have learned to call them ‘blue-green algae.’ But not all of them are blue-green, and they’re definitely not algae. They’re bacteria—bacteria with chlorophyll in them, bacteria that practice the fine old art of photosynthesis.”

“You don’t say,” I said. “I thought plants were the only things that practiced photosynthesis.”

“Boy, you’re stuck in the 1950s,” said the alga. “We algae aren’t plants.”

“Then what are you?”

“No short answer, I’m afraid,” said the alga. “We’re lots of things, none of them plants. But this is what’s important. A great many of us are green, and we’re photosynthesizers. We stole the idea from cyanobacteria. In fact, we abducted some of them, and they still live inside us. Cyanobacteria have been in the sugar-making business for two and a half billion years.”

“All right, you two. You’re wearing me out. I think I’ve got it. A rock tripe is a lichen. A lichen is a compound life-form, part fungus, part photobiont. Are we done?”

Shrill sounds burst from the lichen like whistling balls of fire from a Roman candle. “What on Earth was that?”

“I’m a yeast!” said one impossibly high voice.

“And I’m a second yeast!”

Egad! This was getting complicated. The yeasts spoke in harmony. “We represent the third element of lichens,” they said. “Oh, yes, we know that most of you haven’t caught up with our existence yet. But here’s the scoop. A biologist in Montana, working in partnership with a team of colleagues in Europe, discovered that yeast genes abound in lichens. Turns out that single-celled fungi of our variety, which are in the group basidiomycetes, are just as integral to lichens as the fungus and photobiont partners you already know. A lichen isn’t a marriage between two unrelated organisms. It’s a party!”

A party’s a fine thing, but I’d come into the woods for solitude. Not finding it, I fled. Had I lingered, I’m sure the savvy organisms would have reminded me that I’m a walking sack of disparate genes and organisms myself. It’s a wonderful, complicated world.

8. ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE, AND A GOOD THING, TOO

Gardeners in the Adirondacks complain that the growing season is too damned short. Their complaints are justified, but warmth and sunshine aren’t the only things latitude, altitude, and a position downwind of a continental landmass leave us wishing we had more of. The decomposing is brief, too. Leaves that fell last year, and the year before, and the year before that, along with trees that blew over ten, twenty, and sometimes even fifty or a hundred years ago, are condemned to spend eternity (or so it seems) slowly, ever so slowly, incrementally, returning their elements to the earth from which they grew.

No object looms larger and more abundantly in the path of the Adirondack hiker than the rotting log. There are, it’s fair to say, in excess of a billion of them. (Multiply a conservative estimate of 1,000 per acre times six million acres, and you approach my number from the low side.) I’ve heard people ask, “What good are they?” and comment that our largely unmanaged, “forever wild” forest preserve represents a vast resource going to waste.

Don’t tell that to the hibernating black bears, the rodents, the shrews, the snakes, the salamanders, the millipedes, the centipedes, the isopods, the ants, the beetles, the springtails, the pseudoscorpions, the spiders, the harvestmen (spiderlike arachnids sometimes called daddy-long-legs), the mites, the land snails, and the nematodes that inhabit these spongy worlds of cellulose, lignin, and moisture.

And those are just the animals, and a smattering at that. Rotting logs, “the undead,” as I like to think of them, feed and house practically every kind of terrestrial organism you can think of, from mushroom-producing fungi to slime molds (once considered fungi, but no longer) to protozoa to slime nets (scientists who can pronounce the word call these sticky wisps of protoplasm labyrinthulids). Lichens, algae, and moss grow on decomposing trees, too. So do seedling hemlocks, pines, yellow birches, and a variety of other woody plants and herbs. For good reason foresters call tree carcasses “nursery logs.”

For the majority of inhabitants, the rotting log serves chiefly as a place to hide, find moisture, anchor roots, avoid freezing, nurture eggs and larvae, and find other creatures to eat. But fungi, made up of networks of threadlike structures called hyphae, penetrate the log and digest it. (The mushroom or bracket you see represents a reproductive organ, not the fungus itself.)

What’s to eat in a rotten log? Wood, the chief solid component of the undead, consists for the most part of cellulose and lignin. Look them up in the dictionary. They’re complex carbohydrates, which is to say, essentially long chains of sugars. It’s not much of a stretch to say that tree trunks are oversized candy canes. The problem is, cellulose and lignin are so complex that the candy store is closed to most organisms. Only a few can dismantle them and make off with their energy. Even a termite cannot break apart these compounds, at least on its own. The termite relies on microbial business partners that live in its gut and do the primary digesting for them. Fungi, on the other hand, at least a great many of them, are masters at it.

As a naturalist guide who leads Adirondack visitors on rambles through the woods, one of my greatest pleasures is introducing children and their parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles to the lives playing out in rotting logs. The feeling, I suppose, is akin to what a Shakespeare fanatic feels when bringing along a friend to her, or his, first performance of Hamlet.

Behold the rotting log. As in the Unabridged Shakespeare, drama lies within. Look closely and you find tragedy (spiders eating their mates, insects devouring their offspring), comedy (salamanders wearing permanent smirks and slime molds resembling discarded bubble gum), conflict, and passion. If you look especially closely, you’ll spy yards and yards of hyphae belonging to who-knows-how-many fungi.

If you’re not sold on the intrinsic value of life itself, say, and you fancy yourself a practical person, you may look down your nose at zombie logs and argue that the forest, and the people who depend on its life for their livings, would be better off cut, hauled, and cleaned up. Is it true?

There can be no question. The argument that forests need to be managed, to have their “mature” trees felled and dragged off before they show signs of old age, is hogwash. Mind you, this is not to say that trees should not be cut. The point is to do so honestly. We cut them because we want their cellulose and lignin to frame and heat houses and to make toilet paper, newsprint, rayon, and countless other useful things. We want what other organisms want—food, shelter, comfort.

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Uncut, log-littered forests teem with life and interest—barred owls and martens and flying squirrels raising young in hollow trees, gray tree frogs calling on rainy days from old woodpecker holes, lichens spattering the trunks and branches, warblers caroling for mates. And best of all, they’re self-renewing, as they were before humans appeared, as they are now, and as they will be long after we’ve left the stage.

9. WILDLIFE, MORE OR LESS

Often I meet someone who claims the “forever wild” nature of the New York State Forest Preserve, which constitutes the nearly three million acres of public land in the Adirondacks, is bad for wildlife. The more trees we cut, the more wildlife we’ll have. So goes the thinking.

I confess what I think is a healthy skepticism. Old and ancient forests seem more alive with things that interest me and my guiding clients—salamanders, warblers, wildflowers, ferns, and more—than the sunnier, simplified habitats of clear-cuts and thinned woods.

Yes, it’s true that removing trees inflates the numbers of edge-loving animals such as deer, moose, indigo buntings, and brown-headed cow-birds. They thrive on disturbance. Yet what about other, less conspicuous plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, and lichens? Massive, mossy trunks still living but partially gutted by fungi, carpenter ants, and pileated woodpeckers seem far more alive to me than young ones.

I recently found myself wondering how science weighs in on this discussion. Surely serious studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals must point one way or another: toward a positive influence of logging on wildlife in general, or toward a negative effect.

To satisfy my curiosity, I contacted two scientists whose fair-mindedness I trust. Michael Klemens, PhD, a consulting biologist long affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the American Museum of Natural History, has been a friend since 1981. He helped me launch an all-taxa biological inventory (ATBI) of a Westchester County park in 1985.

“The issue of working forests and biodiversity is not as straightforward as one would hope,” Klemens replied to my email. “Old growth forest . . . has specific biological values and a guild of species that require uber-mature stands. Once you [consider] many species of amphibians and reptiles, a certain amount of selective harvest, shelter cutting, etc. actually does benefit these species in two ways. Ecologically it creates thermoregulatory opportunities [read sunshine for basking], but more importantly it keeps the land—especially in our region—from being developed.” Forests managed for selective harvest, Klemens says, are far kinder to wildlife than subdivisions.

Biologist Celia Evans of Paul Smith’s College spoke with me over coffee at Saranac Lake’s Blue Moon Cafe. She hesitated to comment in a general way, noting that the science is too spotty to support sweeping pronouncements. Yet she was eager to talk about work she and others have done near the college, comparing the salamanders found in managed and unmanaged woodlots.

“There seemed to be a positive correlation,” Dr. Evans explained, “between salamander numbers and leaf litter depth. In clear-cut areas, leaf litter depth is still very patchy after nine years. You’re lucky if you find a salamander in a clear-cut. If you do, it’ll probably have a decreased mass and length.” Evans left me with homework: a stack of scientific papers to read.

These provided shards of light, yet nothing to end the debate. A study in southeastern Washington State found that red-backed salamander numbers were reduced by thinning as well as clear-cutting, possibly due to “direct machine impacts and soil compaction from skidders.” In southern Ontario not far from the Adirondacks, researchers found amphibian diversity and abundance high in undisturbed forests and in wetlands adjacent to such forests. The only wetland amphibian that benefited from tree removal was the bullfrog.

In northern California, a study reported “Amphibian abundances . . . similar in thinned and un-thinned forests, but body condition of the most common species was lower in thinned forests.”

Do salamanders matter, and are they legitimate indicators of wildlife diversity in general? No one can say, at least absolutely. Yet amphibians are surely the most abundant vertebrate animals in Adirondack forests, and in ecology, little things often loom large.

“Most of us pay little attention,” one report observed, “to the rich molluscan fauna of our forests. But songbirds do, often depending on snail shells for the calcium they need to form their eggs and bones.”

Part of the trouble with assessing whether logging is good, bad, or indifferent for salamanders, snails, and wildlife in general arises from the paucity of meticulously gathered evidence on which to base opinion. Full-blown biodiversity studies over a wide range of habitats and logging regimes are needed. These are expensive and demanding of time in the extreme.

To date, such work has focused mainly on specific organisms, such as salamanders, on big wild places, such as Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and on small, isolated pockets of wildness in suburbs. The fragmentary evidence points toward highest species richness in uncut forests, and to far more diversity in selectively harvested woods than in clear-cuts.

Yet the issue can’t easily be distilled to a single position. Biologists Steven P. Campbell, David A. Patrick, and James P. Gibbs explain in a forthcoming book (a portion of the text kindly shared with me by Dr. Patrick, then of Paul Smith’s College) that the heterogeneity, or rich diversity of microhabitats, of “primary natural forests” makes them “much more ‘biodiverse’ than managed forests.” Yet on the same page, the authors note that the most intensely managed forests, tree plantations, can have a positive impact on wildlife by concentrating their disturbances on a limited fraction of the landscape, perhaps leaving other areas available for wild things.

Logging good or bad for wildlife? It’s a big subject. As my forester and logger friends would inject, and reasonably so, let’s not forget about the framing lumber and toilet paper on which we all depend.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A few words of thanks are in order. Behind every published writer stand good publishers and editors. At Adirondack Explorer I owe thanks to publishers Dick Beamish, Tom Woodman, Betsy Dirnberger, and Tracy Ormsbee and to editors Phil Brown, Brandon Loomis, and Jim Odato. At the Connecticut-based Acorn Press and Hersam-Acorn Newspapers and the Bedford, New York Record-Review, I am pleased to thank publishers Tom Nash and Deborah G. White and editors Jack Sanders, Sally Sanders, Felix Carroll, R. J. Marx, and Edward Baum. My friend Rob Igoe helped get this book launched by sharing the manuscript with his colleagues at Globe Pequot. At this fine publishing house, I had the pleasure of working with excellent and congenial editors, Jake Bonar and Meredith Dias, and with a talented and energetic marketing manager, Alyssa Griffin. I also want to thank the biologist and naturalist colleagues at Saranac Lake Free Library for much research assistance over the years. And of course I want to thank my family—grandparents, parents, siblings, children, in-laws, and more—and my nature-loving friends and readers for helping keep me afloat and engaged in all the ways that count.