Tag Archives: Nature

Winooski River Portrait 2020

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Yesterday I volunteered again for the Winter Bald Eagle Survey. My route is the Winooski River, from Waterbury to Lake Champlain. This is a pretty good distance, so it means driving along the river and stopping at several locations to look for eagles. I have never seen one along the river, only where the river meets the lake, but I have seen eagles above the river at other times, so I was hopeful.

I didn’t see any eagles yesterday, not even at the lake, but I did enjoy being out there. As I have at other times I have done this survey, I took one photo at each of the 14 locations at which I stopped. Below is my Winooski River portrait for January, 2020.

Ice in Duxbury
From the Winooski Bridge in Waterbury
Deforge Hydroelectric Dam in Bolton
Near Long Trail in Richmond
Looking down from the Long Trail Bridge
Winooski River under the Jonesville bridge
Warren and Ruth Beeken Rivershore Preserve, Richmond
Bridge in Richmond, Vermont
Fontaine canoe access, Williston
Overlook Park, Williston
Woodside Park, Colchester
Winooski River Walk
Ethan Allen Homestead trail, Burlington
Winooski River as it flows in Lake Champlain

Some Water

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It has been nice enough that I have slept out on the porch several nights in a row. But it rained a couple of nights ago. A lot. In the dark hours, thunderstorms arrived. Flashing. Booming. Pounding rain. One lightning strike was so close it yanked me from sleep and I shook like a fish pulled from a pond. Can’t help but laugh at yourself for that.

All that rain filled the rivers. Right here, the river overflowed. Water filled the fields. The road stayed above it but you could take a paddle out on the new lake. Some of our neighbors did. My wife took a walk and found a family of raccoons in a tree surrounded by water. Later they were gone. I guess they decided to swim for it. My son saw an otter.

This is why we shouldn’t build in flood zones. The river needs some place to go when the rains come. It still rushed past the bridge. It stays in the channel. It just needs to also take some room in the fields, at least temporarily. The cows moved up the hill. The Kingfishers were fine–their nest in the river bank was high enough. And the ducks don’t care. Nature adapts. It is just us humans that have trouble with change.

It rained more today. The water in the fields is receding, however. More thunderstorms are forecast so it could be a bit before the fields dry out. Lake Champlain has been at flood stage for days. This rain will keep it there for a while yet. I plan to sleep out on the porch again tonight. I need to trust that the thunder claps won’t scare my pajama pants right off.

Winooski River Portrait 2018

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Yesterday I participated in the Winter Bald Eagle Survey. My route was the Winooski River, from Waterbury to Lake Champlain. While I did not see any eagles, I got to see the river in its winter splendor. It was cold. The day started at 3 below zero and got all the way up to 6 degrees. Here is the Winooski River as I saw it yesterday.

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Just after sunrise in Waterbury

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Winooski Street Bridge, Waterbury

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Deforge Hyrdoelectric Dam. Note the ice after high water earlier in the week.

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From the Long Trail access point, Duxbury

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Long Trail footbridge

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From Jonesville bridge

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Warren and Ruth Beeken Rivershore Preserve

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Town park, Richmond

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Near Fontaine Canoe Access, Williston

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Overlook Park, Williston

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Woodside Park, Colchester. The river is under all that ice.

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Winooski River Walk, Winooski

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Winooski, Vermont

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Flooded fields at Ethan Allen Homestead

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From the bike path bridge as the Winooski River ends at Lake Champlain

Autumn in Full Swing

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img_4170The turning foliage this year is brilliant. Every day it seems to get brighter. This is one of the benefits of living here. Nature creates art. We are surrounded by beauty.

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Shelburne Farms

Took a walk at Shelburne Farms the other day. Ka-pow! The lake was roiled. The wind was up. The leaves flashed their colors. The gray clouds skipped across the sky.

Lake Champlain Surf

Lake Champlain Surf

Yesterday rain fell. The sky was dark. By late afternoon the sky was really dark. But then the sun broke through and the hills lit up. Eye candy.

img_4206Suddenly this will all be gone. The wind will rush in and strip the trees. The fields will turn from green to brown. Snow will fall. The world will be beautiful in a new way. But this, this is stunning. It calls for expletives and interjections and exclamations and acclamations. And sometimes all of them in one sentence.

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Afternoon, Stick Season

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The river runs not high but not low. A sand bank toward the far side pushes the water away, causing the current to run faster. Across the river the banks drop steeply. In spring, Bank Swallows nest here, burrowing into the sand, flying low over the water to catch flies. Today it is not spring. Fall’s glory has passed. The brilliance of turning leaves is over. Those leaves lie in wilted piles among the bare shrubs.

But it is not yet winter. The current flows smoothly over rocks and sand and mud. A few moths still flit among the maples. There is no ice under which the water must crawl, no ice to scrape at the log lodged in the river’s bend. Snow does not yet fall. Today there are no clouds and the air is warm enough for scattered green leaves in the under-story to spread to catch the sun. But the sun is low, and will not last much longer today.

Upstream, at the mouth of the stream that melts into the river, a beaver just stirs in its lodge. It has been waiting for the light to dim, for shadows to grow long. It dips into the water, swims, waits again. Soon it will climb the bank to work at the silver maple it plans to fell. Already it has cleared smaller trees. It will chew away the bark, working steadily, wary of predators. Perhaps this tree will fall before winter sets in. Perhaps spring winds will send it tumbling. Perhaps it may prove more stubborn, standing for years before its top branches dip into the water. The beaver, however, does not concern itself with such possibilities. It simply works.

Two Blue Jays call across the bare trunks. A woodpecker knocks. A second calls to it and sends the first flapping away. A small breeze taps branches together, but mostly it is quiet. Crickets, cicadas, birds do not sing. Squirrels stay still. The woods here rest, exposed, not waiting exactly, not sure or unsure, just knitting the past into the present so the future can be only an imagined thing that does not matter to this day.

Soon the sun will drop below the hills. The day’s heat will drift off, like milkweed seeds across a field. In the dark, the river will seem louder. No bats will dot the skies but owls will call. Already owls are planning for spring, finding mates, starting nests. They plan for the future, like the beaver, doing today what must be done for tomorrow. Mice will crawl under dry leaves, finding seeds that won’t become flowers, feeding the owls, thinking only of right now, this November day next to the river that will not stop flowing, even when the ice comes.

Paying Attention

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IMG_0538I started birding in earnest after I had a stroke. Instead of going to therapy, I went outside and paid attention to the world around me. I tried to run, but I found that I just kept thinking inwardly, going to dark places. It wasn’t fun. When I went birding, however, I was looking outward rather than inward. I was focused on sights and sounds, on the wind and the river under the bridge, on finding something new wherever I was. I returned feeling better, feeling more perspective on my place in the world.

Getting out in nature can have this impact for many people. It is hard not to notice what is around when you are hiking a mountain trail or canoeing a river. Birding for me gave me more of a focus. I had to pay attention. If my goal was to find as many different birds as possible, I had to be aware. Being passive was not an option. So I got out there and I paid attention and it healed my mind. Having a task, a focus, was key. I stopped paying attention to me when I paid attention to what I heard and saw.

Yesterday morning I visited the Catamount Outdoor Family Center in Williston to go birding. This was part of a bird walk sponsored by Green Mountain Audubon. There were quite a few people there, maybe 20 or so. I meant to count the people but I was too focused on counting birds. We walked the trails for over two hours and, despite the hundreds of mosquitoes, found 45 species of birds. Two highlights were the flock of Blue Jays mobbing a Barred Owl and a Red-Winged Blackbird chasing a Green Heron. We also heard, however, a Brown Creeper, a shy bird who looks like tree bark and whose song is high and hard to hear. Finding that bird means really paying attention so it is rewarding to discover it.

The photo above has a Cedar Waxwing in it. It is perched at the top of a fir. It is hard to see, but I heard its high trilling song, then narrowed down its location and saw it well with binoculars. Birding is not about seeing the birds that make themselves obvious. It is about seeking out the birds that are there, finding them even when they are not obvious. That is the therapy for me in birding.

Cedar Waxwing, not hiding at all

Cedar Waxwing, not hiding at all

I will keep at it for now. There are multiple levels of challenge. How many birds can I find with each outing? How many birds can I find each year? How many birds can I find this year in my county? What might I find new today? Can I finally learn the song of the Blackburnian Warlber? There is the life list to consider as well: how many birds can I find ever? I won’t get bored. I will continue to learn and to discover new things. I will keep my mind healthy. And while I’m at it, I will have fun. That’s some good therapy right there.

Morning Dew

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Mornings these days are covered in dew.  The grass–wet.  The flowers–wet.  Everything is wet.  My son’s jacket was left out last night.  I found it after my morning run, soggy as the rest of it.  The field is dewy and filled with spider webs.  The whole stretch of it is filled with webs.  They drip with dew and as the sun angles low across the world, they shine.  Looking out in the early hours I can see them hanging between stalks of aster and milkweed and goldenrod.

Web Hanging in the Morning Dew

Web Hanging in the Morning Dew

This morning Venus dangled in the sky like a jewel.  The wind stirred the fog over the river.  The asters, closed for the night, bent in the breeze.  The world woke.  And I ran out into it and back.  And I felt alive.  And the sun rose over the beauty of it all.

Asters, September

Asters, September

And there we have a September morning.

Up and Running

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I have been getting up early to run these past few mornings.  I love to do that.  The problem is that it is hard to get up early.  At least, it’s hard to get up early enough to be back in time to get all of us ready for work and school and whatnot.  I’m rising in the dark, and it is only going to get darker.  And then I’ll get all used to the darkness slowly shifting they’ll throw daylight savings at me.  I pretty much hate daylight savings.  Why can’t we just pick where the clocks will be?

Anyway, I’m getting up early.  I have to be all careful so I don’t wake the woman in the bed next to me who has tried so hard to sleep all night.  I have to be quiet as I walk down the hall and down the creeky stairs so I don’t wake the children.  I always step on some toy or bang into some chair left in an odd place.  I rarely get out without some loud crash or bump or screech.  But get out I do.

And when I do, the sun is working on the back side of Camel’s Hump and the sky glows and the low clouds are tinged with pink and the world is just beautiful.  It is hard not to enjoy it when the day starts off with its show.  Cloudy, rainy, clear, snowing, whatever, it is always beautiful.  If you can’t see it you need glasses or something.  Or you live in a place where you can’t see the world around you.  Because the world is just plain old stunning as the sun rises and the wind shakes the dew from the turning leaves and the spider webs grace the goldenrod.  I may be tired but it is so worth it.

Tomorrow morning I will try to rise again, even earlier.  The farther I want to go the earlier I need to rise.  So once I really get to the high mileage I need to get up way early.  But I’m just doing the shorties now–one to five miles–just to get out there and feel the morning and to get moving.  Sure, I’ll train for something sooner or later, and sure, I’ll run later in the day at times, but I need to remember, when I am bleary eyed and tuckered, that the early morning will give me a shot better than any espresso.

My shoes get wet as I walk across the dew-covered grass.  A late bat swoops over the field.  The asters quake in the breeze.  And the smell of fallen leaves mingles with a far off skunk and damp earth.  It makes one appreciate being alive.

Pics From Space and a Cool Beetle

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New images were just released from the Hubble telescope, the first since the spring, when some repairs were made.  You can read a New York Times article here to learn more.  Here is one of the images:

Abell 370 Galaxy Cluster

Abell 370 Galaxy Cluster

Look up into the night sky (if you live in a place that isn’t so flooded with light that you can’t see the night sky) and you can see more stars than you can count.  On a clear night, even here so close to so many lights, I can see the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon.  I get, well, starstruck sometimes.  But this photo isn’t of stars, it is of galaxies.  There are too many galaxies to count.  And each one of them contains countless stars.  And eac star is too big to truly comprehend.  It can make one dizzy.

Jupiter is just visible as I write this, rising in the east.  It has been hanging around our skies for many nights lately.  If I could see over the hill to the west I might have seen Saturn or even Mercury just after the sun set.  Dang hill.

The world itself, this planet Earth of ours, is too vast to grasp.  I can’t really fathom 6 1/2 billion people, or the depth of the ocean, or the dryness of the Gobi Desert, or camels.  And look at that picture.  How many worlds are there just within its frame?  How can there not be life out there somewhere? The odds are with us on that one.  It seems almost impossible that there wouldn’t be life beyond Earth.

I saw a beetle today I had never seen before–yellow and black and green with stripes.  Check it out:

Cool Beetle

Cool Beetle

Isn’t that amazing enough?  And the milkweed on which it sits–isn’t there discovery in the shape and color and structure of those leaves?  Countless immense galaxies and tiny new beetles to be gazed upon.  I’ve got more than enough wonder for many lifetimes.

Triptych

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Triptych

After Han-shan

1.

This farmhouse—my home at field’s edge.

Sometimes cars pass on the dusty road.

The woods so quiet, turkeys roost at night.

In the river’s shadowed pools, trout rising.

My daughter and I pick pears from a lonely tree.

My wife tugs carrots from the garden.

And in my house what would you see?

Walls of shelves filled with books.

2.

My father and mother taught me to be content;

I need not envy how others make their living.

Click, click—my wife knits by the window.

Zoom, zoom—my son with his trucks.

Apple blossoms swirl around my raised arms.

Hands in pockets, I listen to warblers high in the oak.

Who might notice how I pass my days?

Well, the mail carrier stops each afternoon.

3.

Walking, I pause at the collapsing barn.

The barn, slowly folding, fills the still mind—

Mornings milking despite drifting snow,

Afternoons stacking the loft with hay.

Where sumac tumbles from the window hole,

And gray walls tremble from swallows’ shadows.

In the old cemetery, the bones of those who built this place—

Their names fading, but written in stone.