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From: Harry Armistead [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2010 8:58 AM
To: Les Roslund; Wayne Bell
Subject: Cedar Creek Road & Ferry Neck, July 2-6, 2010 (+ O.T.: graves, riprap & Sibley's trees).
CEDAR CREEK ROAD & FERRY NECK, July 2-6, 2010 + O.T.: GRAVES, RIPRAP & SIBLEY’S TREES.
A very hot but not overwhelmingly humid period without ANY of the much-needed rain. Observations are at our place, Rigby’s Folly, unless otherwise indicated.
JULY 2, Friday. Only 42 Turkey Vultures on the way down. While I nap in the car Liz sees an American Kestrel near Ruthsburg. There’s a single Osprey young in the piling nest at the head of the cove. 3 Diamondback Terrapin. 7 Wild Turkeys by the Waterthrush Pond. 1 adult Laughing Gull, a sort of fall arrival. A big ♀ Five-lined Skink on the front porch. 2 Tree Swallows, also a quasi fall arrival. 1 Muskrat. Very few Fireflies; usually they’re legion this time of year. 84-78° F., clear or fair, NW5, present from 3 P.M. on only.
JULY 3, Saturday:
Rigby’s Folly. See deer 3 times going out the driveway at 3:15 A.M. The harsh winter this year may not have affected them that much (?). This visit we see numerous fawns. From the 2nd floor east “loo” Liz sees 2 ad. Wild Turkeys and 10 pretty small poults. While waiting for the fireworks the Great Horned Owl steams by the dock on strong wingbeats and a Chuck-will’s-widow calls in the distance to the east. Chucks don’t seem to be intimidated by the fireworks. From the dock we have partial views of the pyrotechnics of both Oxford and St. Michaels and distant detonations from the right direction might be those of Cambridge, too. 1 Snowy Egret.
CEDAR CREEK ROAD. 4:45-10:45 A.M. 4.25 miles on foot, 4 by car. 59-81°F., calm becoming NW 10 m.p.h., crystal clear, a gem. Tide highish & rising at start, lowish and lowering at end. This morning’s effort is part of Maryland Audubon’s Bird Blitz 2010, a segment organized by Sarah Warner with emphasis on censusing SALTMARSH SPARROWS.
This is a perfectly beautiful expanse of saltmarsh with no buildings so that one wonders why there was ever a road here in the first place. The last 1.2 miles of this 2-mile, dirt road traverse the saltmarsh. Historically Black Rails occurred here. In winter there are sometimes Rough-legged Hawks and Short-eared Owls. Today the roadside ditches are full of minnows with not much sign of any birds to eat them. 45 species.
GREEN FROGS: At mile 0.4 is a low, wet, muddy area on the south side that has 37 Green Frogs for whom the word dour must have been coined. They are quite alarmed as I walk by, escaping into the woods with calls that are > a squeak, < a squawk, but later when I drive by they just sit there w/o moving when the car pulls up parallel to them and stops.
OF MOST INTEREST: sparrows – 4 Saltmarsh, 1 Song (on territory at road’s end), 6 Swamp (singers; distributed along the length of the road), and 91 Seasides. Least Bittern 1. Marsh Wren 84. Common Yellowthroat 30. Northern Harrier 3 – 2 adult ♀, 1 adult ♂.
MAY 16: I found 53 Seasides here. Some of the differences today include: 1- the presence of many young. 2- being present at a better time of day. 3 – being present 6 hours instead of just an hour or so on May 16. 4 – spending the entire time on foot instead of stopping and starting the car and getting out of it at intervals.
OTHER SPECIES: double-crested cormorant 2. great blue heron 3. great egret 5. snowy egret 31. green heron 3. glossy ibis 1. turkey vulture 3. American black duck 3. osprey 5. bald eagle 3. Virgina rail 3 (1 flushed at close range and flew OVER MY HEAD as it crossed the road and dropped back into the marsh). willet 6 including 2 large young. laughing gull 7. royal tern 1. mourning dove 2. eastern screech-owl 1. great horned owl 1. northern flicker 3. eastern wood-pewee 4. great crested flycatcher 2. eastern kingbird 2. tree swallow 11. barn swallow 16. brown-headed nuthatch 2. Carolina wren 1. house wren 13 (common in the hammocks). eastern bluebird 3. gray catbird 7. pine warbler 5. eastern towhee 5. red-winged blackbird 65. eastern meadowlark 1. common grackle 2. boat-tailed grackle 1♂. brown-headed cowbird 1♀. orchard oriole 2. American goldfinch 1♂.
MISSED SPECIES, in rough order by most surprising miss: chuck-will’s-widow & northern cardinal (a tie). no corvids. clapper rail. Carolina chickadee. red-headed woodpecker (1000s of dead pines line the edge of the hammocks on the south side of the road) & additional woodpeckers other than flicker.
OTHER STUFF. 1000s of Seaside Dragonlets, most of them patrolling at low elevation over the road a few inches. 100s of grasshoppers. An Orange Sulphur. The shoulders have recently been mowed, a 5-foot swath, making the road attractive and inviting. A few diamondback Terrapin nest sites are on/in the road. 2 Sika Elk. Some cicadas are “calling,” the first I’ve heard this year.
VEGETATION & A NON-EXISTENT (?) ROAD. There are only a few rather small meadows of Distichlis spicata and Spartina patens, that I, in my infinite wisdom, would consider to be suitable habitat for Saltmarsh Sparrows. Most of the vegetation consists of Juncus roemerianus with Spartina alterniflora in the wetter sections, as well as scattered bushes and shrubs: Iva frustecens and Baccharis halimifolia, especially at the end where Cedar Creek comes in as well as along the section where Bridge Creek’s “headwaters” reach the road. Some maps show a small side road named Spice Lane going off to the north. From what I see this road doesn’t exist and may never have.
GRAVES. On the north side, just off the road in the woods are 6 graves. The inscriptions on most are illegible or only partly discernible. One dates to 1872 (this and the other years are dates of death). A Wonderly (1931) and a Deanney (1876) lie here. Several gravesites have concrete caskets above ground, in disrepair. One small headstone reads: “Hattie L./daughter of/Isaac T. & Mary C. Andrews/died July 3, 1883/aged 1 mos. 23 days/budded on earth to/bloom in heaven.” It is poignant that by happenstance I am here on the anniversary of her death. All of this is close to an area known as Andrews.
WILLEYS NECK ROAD, slightly north of Cedar Creek Road. Is lined with dense phragmites for 1.5 miles, at which point access is limited by a locked gate. The phrags are so dense and close to the road it’s a little like running a gauntlet. Most of the way in is through wet Loblolly Pine hammocks. 1 Great Egret, 2 Northern Bobwhite (run on the road in front of the car), 1 young Eastern Cottontail. In my experience in recent years most of the quail I’ve seen or heard in Dorchester County are in areas where agriculture is either marginal or entirely missing.
CATTAILS. Both of these roads start off going through pure, wet hammocks of Loblolly Pines which are interspersed with extensive, dense stands of tall cattails, indicating the beginning of a clinal gradient from fresh to salt water marsh vegetation. I’d think there might be a few King Rails in the cattails but do not luck into any.
LIGHTNING. At mile 0.3 going in is a large, live Loblolly Pine that has been struck by lightning and has a resulting open crack down its entire height.
ROBBINS. At this non-town a ♂ Ruby-throated hummingbird is perched on the wire.
BLACKWATER N.W.R. The American White Pelican at Sewards. 2 adult Red-headed Woodpeckers near sign 7 on Wildlife Drive. A reprise of the Cedar Creek Road Green Frog cluster in one of the ditches. 1 Red-bellied Slider. A Sika Elk with her fawn. 1 Tiger Swallowtail. 3 Raccoons in Pool 5, 2 of them youngsters. A lot of the Marsh Hibiscus are starting to bloom, the big white flowers. I am not sure if this is one of the last signs of an early spring or one of the first signs of an early fall but it seems early for them to be blooming (?). The impoundments have become either very dry or with little remaining water.
EGYPT ROAD. A roadkill Eastern Cottontail being attended to by a Turkey Vulture.
JULY 4, Sunday. 74-95, SW5, clear. Too hot to do much. See 3 fawns. All of a sudden around the dock are 32 Barn Swallows, most (all?) of them juveniles. The rest of this visit we see very few, or none. Walk the Olszewski Trails where Sweetgum are like weeds. Keeping them in check is a task for Sisyphus. Cut ‘em off and in a few months they sprout multiple shoots. As in ‘the Hotel California’ “stab them with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast.” A Chuck-will’s-widow at dusk. There’s still the slightest trace of light at 10 P.M. More fireworks, including distant thunder from Easton plus some private parties shoot theirs off, too.
CAR TRAVEL. In the past few years I’ve started to drive to some parts of the place now for the first time since a lot of the brush work and trail clearance creates what you could call ad hoc tasks, and there are a lot of those. This saves time and effort and makes my “landscaping” much more efficient. For example, it is 0.55 miles down the driveway to the Olszewski Trails “trailhead” from the house.
JULY 5, Monday. 77-96, SW5, clear. Two Fowler’s Toads are in the ground English Ivy and Wild Grape by the kitchen hose and don’t seem to appreciate my efforts to hydrate them. They’re the only ones we see (or hear) this visit. They are pudgy and large. A ♂ Northern Cardinal, not content to just do battle with the kitchen and downstairs bedroom windows, has started to bang against the car’s outside mirrors, an avian Don Quijote perhaps. On the driveway are 4 Wild Turkeys consorting with 3 deer, one of them a small buck. John Swaine sprays the fields with herbicide; that takes about an hour. See an American Robin with a broken right leg. 5 Common Wood Nymphs, the first I’ve seen this summer. 2 American Ladies. From 1:45-4:15 Roger Stone and I meet to discuss refuge management of the Chesapeake marsh areas in its domain. He has terrific mapping of the vegetation on his computer. I take down the last 2 large broken branches of the Magnolia grandiflora, victims of last winter’s snows.
JULY 6, Tuesday. Overnight low of c. 77. SW<5. clear. hazy. We leave at 9 A.M. for PA. 2 Brown Thrashers suddenly in the yard, the first in many weeks. A small fawn in Woods 2. Only 24 Turkey Vultures on the way home. Gets up to 102 in Philadelphia followed by an overnight low of 82.
SIBLEY TREE GUIDE. Using some coupons I finally buy one from the Blackwater Visitor Center store, which has so many goodies. Same nice dimensions and flexible binding as the bird guide. Same format with illustrations and text attractively spread out over the page as opposed to the sort of linear progression of features found in most natural history field guides. The range maps, by Steve Holzman, are beauties: fascinating – they stir the imagination and wanderlust - showing state and provincial boundaries and even some ranges into northern Mexico.
This is so much more inviting than other tree books I’ve seen, although I’ve never consulted those very much. Great paintings by Sibley, although I find those showing the general shape and structure of the whole tree and the bark details less satisfying than those of leaves, flowers, fruit, twigs, etc. Sibley, mercifully, avoids technical terms, yet a brief glossary would have been helpful, although the various leaves and fruit types are well-explained and illustrated. A very nice touch – paintings that show how leaves look when they turn colors in the autumn. It’s hard to put this great book down! Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 426 pages, $39.95.
I need to get in line with the correct nomenclature. For decades I’ve been saying Red Cedar but it should be Eastern Redcedar. Tulip Tree should be Tuliptree. American Hackberry should be Southern Hackberry, Black Gum should be Black Tupelo, and so on. The guide also covers the many non-native trees that have become established here in the wild.
FREE CALENDARS. This is the time of year when unsolicited but free calendars come from various environmental organizations. These are welcome. I don’t shell out anymore for the expensive Ansel Adams and other calendars I used to buy. Enough freebies come in for every floor and most bedrooms of both the MD and PA houses. One I got last year, however, shows 4 Green Turtles hauled out on the British Columbia (!) coast with 100s of palms shown in the background. I don’t think so.
RIGBY’S FOLLY SHORELINE REPLENISHMENT, a project initiated in November 2009, was finally finished last week, delayed due to the permitting process, much adverse weather, and other factors, such as presumed inertia of the contractor (who in the end did a great job; they’re the ones who did the original riprapping, which held up for over 40 years). A total of 725.72 tons of rock were used.
Prior to this new work erosion was so bad in some places that it made for a phobic reaction; I would avoid those areas, so hurtful was it to see the shoreline degradation.
Riprap is not great for wildlife. Hardly any algae or barnacles cling to it the way they do in more maritime settings. I don’t expect to ever see a Purple Sandpiper on our rocks. But Sea Roaches and Periwinkles seem to have an affinity for it here. Any heron or egret may hunt from its edge, especially Snowy Egrets. Spotted Sandpipers often launch off from the riprap. I don’t see how Diamondback Terrapins navigate such a formidable obstacle when they haul out to lay their eggs, yet I’ve never found a dead one among the stones.
The only remaining work involves plantings of some mitigation oaks and Spartina alterniflora, set to take place this fall. Fortunately the trail system was minimally impacted. With the work on the yard shoreline complete we now have much better views of the water. We also have some huge new brushpiles that should attract all sorts of creatures.
Perhaps even the thirteen-lined race of the Reticulated Wampus Cat (Felis wampusïi tridecemlineatus), a Pleistocene relict from the Third Interglacial Period notorious for its various symbiotic, sybaritic, and sisyphean relationships with ivorybills. Some maintain that it persists in these climes. Forsooth. Let me know if you see one.
In the mean time, pray for rain. The drought intensifies every day. Our 3 small ponds are about dried up.
Best to all. – Harry Armistead, Philadelphia.
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