Thursday evening, August 23, 2007.  

Dinner with Serge & Paul Duckett in their Sassafras home.  A screech owl
cutting loose with the whinny call at 10 P.M. while I am on the 2nd floor
with Serge (who is an M.D.-Ph.D plus sports a 3rd doctorate he received a
few years ago when he was in his seventies), who is showing me his diffuse,
impressionistic photographs of ballet that Harry N. Abrams, the art
publishing house, is going to publish, a scattering of pearls among swine
in my case.  I don't know anything about art but I know what I like.  But
as the art critic Bernhard Berenson (1865-1959) once said: "So does a cow."
 Thanks, Bernie.  That's about the Dichtung und Warheit of it all, if you
will.     

Got a little tipsy on one screwdriver and 4-5 glasses of wine.  Arrive at
Rigby at midnight.  Coming up the drive a cottontail scampers zig-zag
several times, freezes, then springs a good 3' up into the air, up and over
the grasses and ditch, and off into the field.  Leapin' lizards.  He'd be
good at NBA tip-offs, or whatever they're called.

Rigby's Folly, Armistead property on Ferry Neck, Talbot County, MD, West
Ferry Neck Road near Royal Oak but nearer still to Bellevue. 

Friday, August 24.  Fair, hot, humid, 75-91, winds SE-SW 5-10.  Quite a bit
to see even on this oppressive summer day.

2 Wild Turkeys, 2 Snowy Egrets, 6 Chimney Swifts, 6 Forster's Terns, and a
smattering of hard-won, typical early fall migrants:  3 gnatcatchers, 2
redstarts (1 a smashing adult male), a Red-eyed Vireo, 1 Magnolia, 1
Black-and-white & 1 Prairie warbler.  a Killdeer, 6 martins, a kingfisher,
and 6 chickadees.  43 robins in a group along the Olszewski Trails.  a
Green Heron.  4 Downy Woodpeckers.  5 mockingbirds.

Herptiles.  Medium-sized Five-lined Skink on the front porch as usual. 
Used to be we'd see these attractively-marked, skitterish, gentle little
lizards only a few times a year.  But in 2007 we see them almost every day.
 Froggies in the ponds, mostly Southern Leopards but some Greens also:  20
in The Pond, 1 in the Waterthrush Pond, 11 in the Yard Pond, and none in
Lake Olszewski.  Lake O. is about the dimensions of half of a twin bed but
is an important little reservoir the Olszeski family excavated c. 5 years
ago.  

Jared Sparks recently referred to the Yard Pond as the Varmint Pool.  I
like that and will appeal to the Rigby's Folly Executive Committee on
Geographical Place Name Standardization Authority for a permanent name
change.  Wish me luck.  

Diamondback Terrapin:  137, a new high count, the 2 next highest being 132
on April 23, 2006, and 123 on April 28, 2007.  Today there are small
clusters of them around as well as in the squareish Horn Point experimental
enclosures associated with HP's studies of submerged aquatic vegetation
(SAV) located just off the south side of the mouth of the cove.  

Once again the Fowler's Toads send their regrets.  Haven't seen any since
early summer.

Mammals:  an adult Red Fox resting on the driveway.  5 Gray Squirrels:  1
running with a full-sized Black Walnut in its jaws, another with all
brownish-yellowish underparts foraging in Field 2, a 3rd one digging up
dirt (no scandals involved) on the Olszewski Cross Trail and then rolling
in it (Why?  Feels good?  Socks it to the ectoparasites?).  4 Eastern
Cottontails.  Deer, 6:  2 fawns, 2 does accompanying the small leucistic
buck, and a 3rd doe near Lucy Point, apparently paralyzed from the waist
down and with its tongue hanging way out, a really sad, wrenching thing to
see.

Butterflies:  not many.  4 Red-spotted Purples (one of Roger Tory
Peterson's favorites and one reason he moved to Connecticut).  6 Red
Admirals.  2 Tiger Swallowtails.  2 Common Wood Nymphs.  6 Monarchs.  3
unID'd skippers.  

The heavy rain a few days ago, said to be 3" by one informant, and the
first substantial one since spring, a life saver, filling up our 3 small
ponds.  Wet areas in only 5 or so places in Fields 1, 2 and 4 but the earth
is, mercifully, damp.  The Olszewski trails, often 2/3 under water in
wetter times, are still bone dry.  The driveway circle by the house, nicely
bevelled and wide, only a few years old, is finally beginning to be
completely overgrown by grasses, even in this dry year.  Good.

Since nobody has asked, I'd like to recommend 3 fine new books that I've
bought and begun to read: 

1.  H. Bruce Franklin.  "The most important fish in the sea: Menhaden and
America."  Island Press, 2007, 265pp.  $25.00.  

The Chesapeake is a major staging area for Menhaden.  Much of this book has
to do with our Bay and the ruthless exploitation of Menhaden by Omega
Protein, based locally in Reedville, VA.  Menhaden are the major food
source of our Chesapeake Ospreys and Brown Pelicans.  Paul Spitzer is
quoted.  Franklin is a professor at Rutgers and has written 18 other books,
several dealing with Vietnam as well as prison writing.

2.  Bernd Heinrich.  "The snoring bird: my family's journey through a
century of biology."  Harper/Collins, 2007, 461pp.  $29.95. 

Heinrich's 12 other titles deal with ravens, Canada Geese, running, owls,
and the Maine woods.  His "Bumblebee economics" won the Pulitzer Prize.  I
think I remember reading that he once ran 168 miles in one 24-hour period;
now that's pickin' 'em up and puttin' 'em down.   A 168-mile CAR trip, and
I'm whipped.  He's professor emeritus of biology at the U. of Vermont.  His
father was an authority on ichneumon wasps.  The "snoring bird" is a
"ground-living jungle rail from Indonesia that had been thought to be
extinct." (p. xv)  Heinrich's family came to America after dealing with 2
world wars in Germany and Poland.

3.  Michael Punke.  "Last stand: George Bird Grinnell, the battle to save
the Buffalo, and the birth of the New West."  Smithsonian Books, 2007,
286pp.  $25.95.  

Grinnell participated in the last great Buffalo hunt, became an authority
on Native Americans of the Great Plains, was tutored by Audubon's widow,
Lucy, and consorted with Buffalo Bill, George Armstrong Custer, Teddy
Roosevelt, and ... everyone else.  He is the person most responsible for
establishing Glacier National Park, was instrumental in founding the
Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the American Ethnological Society,
and on, and on.  

John Reiger, brother of my good friend George R. (Conservation Editor of
"Field & Stream" for 25 years), is an authority on Grinnell and author of
"The passing of the Great West: selected papers of George Bird Grinnell"
(1972) and "American sportsmen and the origins of conservation" (1974, rev.
ed. 2001).  John is largely responsible for saving Grinnell's writings,
which came close to being thrown out.

That's it for a while.  Pray for more rain, and a few cold fronts, and the
birds they bring us from The North.

Best to all.-Henry ("Harry") T. Armistead, 523 E. Durham St., Philadelphia,
PA 19119-1225.  215-248-4120.  Please, any off-list replies to: 
harryarmistead at hotmail dot com  (never, please, to 74077.3176 ....)