The Real Reelfoot Lake

Sunday was the best day of our KSNH weekend, because the sun finally came out. Since Reelfoot is on the Mississippi flyway, lots of migrating birds stop here. We visited a wetlands with duck blinds for handicapped hunters. Up to five people can use the drive-up blind, but one has to be in a wheelchair. They were in pretty bad shape after last winter's ice storm, and some hunter will have to clean them up before the season starts. Too bad we'll never see them as just duck watching blinds during the season.

Reelfoot Lake NWR is known for its lily ponds. They should be famous for duckweed as well, since it grows any place where fishermen don't take their boats on a regular basis, resembling a smooth grassy lawn under the trees.

Reelfoot Lake is surprisingly shallow. Many places are 5 feet deep, and the deepest pools are only about 18 feet deep. The wind can blow up good sized whitecaps in a storm though. Many of the cypress trees growing away from the shore are remnants of a cypress forest that grew here before the 1812 earthquake that flooded the area and created the lake. The naturalist said that stumps under the water are still in good condition, while those which are exposed sometimes have rotted. It's hard to determine the age of the oldest trees, since the heart wood rots out leaving a large hollow in the middle, while the rest of the tree lives for many more years.

Bald Cypress trees are deciduous conifers, losing their needles in the winter. "Knees" grow up as part of the root system, giving more stability to their foundation in the soft unstable bottom land. The knees also help oxygenate the trees when their roots are under water.

This looks like a group of knee monks heading for mass in the cathedral. Local people will cut the knees off and sell them at roadside stands. They advise you to boil the wood, then drill a hole up the middle to make a lamp. Sorry, not for me.

Whose Fault Is It?

We joined the Kentucky Society for Natural History on their fall conference at Reelfoot Lake this weekend. As we packed the car on Thursday morning, a quick glance at the weather map showed bright areas of green, yellow and red between Louisville and Colorado. It's going to be a rough weekend, we agreed. Indeed, as we explored the New Madrid fault region, we drove through miles and miles of rain. In addition to being wet, we spent the weekend without technology! Our T-Mobile phones had no signal at all, and the resort where we stayed, although very nice otherwise, had no Internet connections. This was truly a test of our dedication to nature studies! If you aren't familiar with history of the area, New Madrid, MO, was the epicenter of the worst earthquakes in the United States, in 1811 and 1812. The fault was created by a rift that failed about 500 million years ago, and the rift valley filled with sediment. The actual fault is about 25 miles underground, so you don't see evidence of faulting as you would in California, for instance.

Fortunately, the center of the country was relatively unpopulated at that time, when earthquakes exceeding 7 and 8 on the current Richter scale struck over a 3 month period. The fault crosses under the Mississippi River in several places, and uplifting caused the river itself to flow upstream for a while. Liquefied sand erupted in large geysers. The quakes were felt as far away as Canada. I-55 has a rest stop at the site of the epicenter, although they don't publicize it.

Will there be another quake here? Sure, but no one knows when. The damage will be catastrophic when it hits this time, given the size and nearness of cities like St. Louis, Memphis, Nashville and, yes, Louisville. A relatively small quake in April 2008 was centered in Illinois, felt in Louisville, and arose from the New Madrid fault system. Seismometers in the area show unfelt earthquakes occurring regularly. NOVA has a good online video about the New Madrid fault system.

The river itself is not exactly what I expected. The Army Corps of Engineers has turned the Ohio River into a series of lakes using dams and locks. Their goal is to maintain a navigation channel nine feet deep at all times. We call it the Ohio Lake here in Louisville.

The Mississippi River also has dams for navigation, but in between the dams the river twists and turns as it did in the days of Mark Twain. We watched a fully loaded coal barge turn almost sideways to make a turn around a large sand bar. A towboat pushing a full load of fifteen barges is like trying to steer three football fields, 365 days a year, in all kinds of weather. The map above shows some of the channels from the last 250 years. Oxbow lakes, such as Reelfoot, are left as the channel changes directions. The land is perfectly flat and fertile, so farmers plant great fields of corn, soybeans and cotton. Migrating Tree Swallows swoop after insects we can't even see, then perch on the power lines. I saw more Kestrels this weekend than ever before.

We drove downstream to the nearest bridge, then up the Missouri bootheel through the fault zone. Not wanting to drive that far again to get back to Reelfoot, we got to ride the Hickman Ferry across the river, back to the Kentucky side. The small boat you see on the side of this photo is on a hinge. When we pulled away from shore, this part swung out and around, so it could push across the river in a forward direction, just as it did on the way to pick us all up.

My next postings will all be about our weekend at Reelfoot, and the cypress swamps and wildlife we enjoyed.

Monarch Migration and National Parks

It's October, and the flowers are starting to die back. Dick is making plans to re-organize the butterfly garden for next year. The roses love the cooler weather we are having, and are full of blooms. From my window, I notice activity around the butterfly bushes.

It's migration season for the Monarchs and there must be at least 15 of them taking a pit stop on our bushes to sip nectar and rest a bit before the nest step in their journey.

I think it's a long trip to ride 8.5 hours in the car going to Wisconsin. Imagine if we had to flap our arms and fly there, or even farther, for our vacations. The wind buffets these small creatures, requiring extra effort to go small distances. Last weekend they looked like pieces of orange tissue paper, tossed by the wind. Imagine reaching the Gulf of Mexico, knowing you have to fly across it without any place to stop and rest.

We watched the Ken Burns series on the National Parks this week on PBS, loving the wonderful photography and hours of research required for it. I wonder if John Muir would have been involved with wilderness to the same extent if he had been born a century later, in 1938 rather than 1838. Luckily for us he was there to push for the preservation of wild places while there were still wild. It's humbling to think of all the people who made our Parks what they are - explorers, environmentalists, kids in the CCC, motorists willing to drive an open car along unpaved roads with no AAA to save them when they had car trouble. Dick and I enjoyed watching the development of interpretation as a skill among the NPS Rangers. And God love whoever designed those ranger hats! You can spot them a mile away! I was especially moved by the daughter of Alaska superintendent, John Cook, who was the fourth generation of her family to serve with the Park Service. If you missed this marvelous opportunity, you can see clips or even full episodes from it online at http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/watch-video . Maybe there's still hope for the human race after all. After all, it's always morning somewhere.

Hang Gliding

Although the Falls of the Ohio State Park is not large as state parks go, it can seem like two entirely different places just in the space of 24 hours. Saturday, we just missed a large mass of rain and storms that passed to the east of Louisville. The day was humid, and exceedingly cloudy however. In the woods along the river bank warblers darted from branch to branch, waiting for a front to move through so they could resume migration. I had no time to focus the binoculars, let alone a camera. Migrating Blue Jays called raucously above.

We have a breeding pair of Ospreys which successfully raised two offspring from a nest in a cell tower by the power plant at the Falls this summer. Our family of Ospreys were out in force all weekend. Flapping mightily in the still air, they circled the same spot on the river for fish. One hovered for a while - has he found a fish? Dive down, and swoop back up again at the last minute. Over several hours, we only saw one Osprey actually catch anything, even though they moved upstream and downstream trying for better luck. Did the dull skies affect their hunting? They must have been very tired and hungry after hours of this. This is a lifetime chance to get FOUR Ospreys in the same shot!! Overnight the rain from upstream caught up with us, and acres of exposed fossil beds were covered with raging rapids as the Army Corps of Engineers opened the gates of the dam. A stiff breeze blew all day, and the solid dark clouds lightened, then left altogether. After yesterday's effort, the Osprey family spent the day just hang gliding, along with the Peregrine Falcon, Black Vultures, Turkey Vultures, and an occasional hawk or two. Fortunately, I walked the fossil beds on Saturday, during the dry, and got some new fossil photos to add to my collection. How many people do you know who take pictures of rocks? The stiff breeze was not enjoyed by butterflies though. I watched several brave Monarchs trying to fly across the river into a headwind that must have seemed like a hurricane to one so small. I don't know if any of them made it across or not.

Now, I have a question for all you bird photographers. On a day like today, I can see the birds high above in my binoculars pretty well, but I'd sure like to get better photos of them. At the Falls, for example, many of the birds will be at least half a mile away. I do not have a real DSLR camera, being hesitant to spend the $$$$$$$ required, and also reluctant to cart multiple lenses around to take photos of both butterflies and birds on the same day. My Panasonic Lumix lets me zoom from near to far so easily, and it weighs very little so I can carry it all day. But I'm zoom greedy, and want to zoom more. What do you all use and find convenient for your good photos? Do you get frustrated changing lenses, and maybe losing the shot of the decade? Is there any way to get the equipment and try it for 30 days or so? Do you get a faster, sharper focus by turning the lens instead of using autofocus? I tried digiscoping and never got more than the inside of the scope's tube, so forget that. Please let me know by comment or email. I appreciate all your knowledge and experience. By the way, I bought a Nikon P90 with a 24x zoom, and it won't focus on birds if there is anything else around them (like leaves and branches). Booooo! I gave it to my husband to use and took back the first one.

Happy Anniversary

Hello. My name is Bailey, and my people (Mary Beth and Brian) are off celebrating their one year wedding anniversary this weekend. That's why I'm here with my feline cousins, Binx and Pippin. I'm pretty happy with the arrangement, as you can see from my smile. Binx and I get along pretty well. Most of the time we just ignore each other and enjoy being on the porch. Sometimes he wants to start a fuss by jabbing at my tail, even though I'm not doing anything to him. Kathy has to speak sternly to him then. I just grin.

Kathy and Dick take good care of me. Dick keeps trying to make me into an outdoor dog, who goes for long walks in the park. Sorry, but I'm a city girl. I go outside, attend to business, and am ready to go back in. How easy can his life get? Once in a while I hear strange noises at night and bark to scare them off. Those people don't realize how close they live to danger when I'm not around. The cats only protect the house from bad cats in the neighborhood, and would not yowl at anything else even if they were invited. I guess it's just a dog thing. Mary Beth and Brian should be back tomorrow and I'll get to go back to my own house that we just moved to this summer. It will be nice to be home again (no offense intended). But it is kind of fun to go online....

Equinox at Bernheim Forest

Although Fall has been sneaking up on us for several weeks, the equinox makes it official now. Bernheim Forest has their ColorFest on Oct. 17, and once again, my volunteer jobs all have great opportunities on the same date so I will have to choose carefully which I can join.

My friend, Tavia Cathcart, is collaborating on a book about Bernheim and says they have few pictures of birds. Well, I can certainly help with that! I sent her about 40-50 of my National Geographic bird photos. If/when they are used in the book, I'll let you all know. I'm pretty excited about it!

This little cutie got perturbed as we followed him around the edge of Lake Nevin. Don't you love his punk hair do? Can there be conjoined trees? This one looks like it had two hearts before it fell in the ice storm.

"Leaves of three, let it be." Both the poison ivy and Virginia Creeper start the parade of fall colors. Yellow is the primary fall color for wildflowers, with Goldenrod dominating the fields and roadsides. It's such a treat to discover a little bug in a photo when you enlarge it. This one is in flight from one sprig to the next on the Goldenrod.

Many different trees have red berries, but this one wins the prize in my book for the most scarlet, vermilion, red I saw. Fire engines should be jealous of this color.

You would expect a flower called Blazing Star to be red or yellow, right? How about this lavender shade instead. The Monarchs love it.

Cypress trees by Lake Nevin join in the color contest as their leaves/needles turn a rusty umber shade before the Garden Pavilion. I need to attend an art class to learn more color names!

Let No Leaf Go Unchewed

Our butterfly garden has been a learning experience this summer. We attracted butterflies all right, not quite the numbers I hoped, but a nice variety of species. Along with the butterfly bushes and cone flowers, we planted three kinds of milkweed, the swamp milkweed, butterfly weed (the orange one), and a tropical milkweed given to us by a fried. Of course, you plant milkweed to attract Monarch butterflies. Three Monarch caterpillars now live on the tropical milkweed, speeding up and down the stems, or pausing to chow down on the leaves. It's hard to tell which end is the front, just as the caterpillars intended. Corinne Mastey, one of the volunteer naturalists at Bernheim Forest, is involved in a program to track Monarch migration patterns. They tag the Monarchs with little identifying dots on the wings, much like bird banding.

We keep looking on the larger swamp milkweed, but haven't found caterpillars or cocoons on it yet. Hopefully, we will find the chrysalis for one of these guys and can put it in a box to watch the butterfly emerge. This plant is shaded by the larger butterfly plant, so I think we'll move it to a spot with more consistent sun for next year.

Milkweed beetles also adore the tropical milkweed plant, especially the seed pods. According to BugGuide.net, there are many species of milkweed beetles. The tropical milkweed is an annual in our climate, but we can save the seeds and start them in the spring. Dick is enlarging the garden to add more native plants next year.

Riverland Conservancy

The last day of vacation is always a bit melancholy. You want to cram in the last bit of fun, all the things you haven't done so far, but there just isn't time. You know you have to pack everything up and get it all in the car again as early as possible tomorrow morning. It's trite, perhaps, to talk about saving the best for last, but I certainly enjoyed today because we got to do some real birding in some terrific prairie regions.

The Wisconsin Birding Trail has five listings for Sauk County, and we covered three of them through the week. Today we went to the Riverland Conservancy - Merrimac Preserve. Alliant Energy, the power company, operates several restoration areas, and this one is just south of Devil's Lake State Park. The Merrimac Preserve encompasses more than 1,800 acres of forest, prairie, savanna, wetlands and streams in south-central Wisconsin, and provides a wildlife corridor between the Baraboo Bluffs and the Wisconsin River.

Although we found this place through the Birding Trail, the restored prairie simply blew me away. The grass and flowers we taller than we were! Just imagine what it was like for the first settlers, who must have felt buried in grass. I've never seen purple grass before, but several varieties stretched as to the horizon with short or tall purple/reddish grasses. We followed the bio-diversity trail through prairie, wetlands, and oak savanna regions, enthralled with both the plants and animals we found. I'm sure we spent much longer to complete the trail than the planners had in mind!

I kept seeing the prairie as an inverted forest. When forest birds want to hide, they fly up to the canopy where the dense leaves protect them from flying predators. In the prairie, the birds and other animals dive down into the densest grass and flowers, where the crowded stems protect them. Although a hawk or owl can hear or see a mouse on the ground, the vegetation is so thick the bird couldn't possibly capture the mouse once it was in the tall grass, could it? I noticed the same thing about the miles of corn growing in Wisconsin. Mice could hide forever in those forests of standing cornstalks. No hawk could fly into them.

Although the official Wisconsin State Bird is the American Robin, I would recommend changing that to the Turkey Vulture, which certainly seemed the most common bird we saw this week! The Birding Trail book says that Sedge Wren and Lark Sparrows are rare at the Merrimac Preserve. We saw a lot of LBJ's (Little Brown Job's), many of which were sparrows and wrens, but darned if I could see them long enough to decide what kind! All the birds seemed to be in a hurry, and enamored of the thickest branches. One resembled a Meadow Lark, but had a thick beak. Ah! I remember seeing that one before - the Dickcissel! The field guide confirms that the bib is missing in fall. Cedar Waxwings and Gold Finches were easier to locate and identify. Upon investigation, the wren was probably a House Wren. A few fall warblers of generic color and markings joined the anonymous flocks.

Then a raptor flashed by! It turned and displayed a red tail - Red Tailed Hawk we said. But as it turned, it seemed small for a Red Tail, and the face looked white with malar stripes. Could it be a falcon??? I tracked it to a distant tree and got this shot, but the details are unclear. The field guide says neither Peregrines nor Prairie Falcons live in Wisconsin. Sigh... It was probably a Red Tailed Hawk after all. Anyone else have a good guess on little evidence?

A dragonfly couple danced a duet around the wetlands, then flew away.

The wild grapes are just as ripe as those at the winery. I just hope some migrating bird doesn't get drunk on them!

We thought this might be a lupine, but now I don't think so. More investigation is required, but isn't it beautiful? Blue flowers are rare and special to me.

After our walk through the prairie we went back to Devil's Lake to eat lunch. The place was packed with picnickers and swimmers. We decided to get a double kayak and take a spin around the lake for a while. Our was not fiberglass, but inflatable, like a raft -- rather unusual, we thought. Let's just say that we got to see a 360 degree view of the lake as we paddled around, and the double paddles made sure we didn't overheat as they dripped all over us. We returned to shore to dry off, and found this marker on the sunny bench: "Life is a journey, not a destination." Somehow that seemed especially appropriate for our kayak adventure!

Our final adventure for the day was a horse drawn wagon ride through the Lost Canyon. This one wins hands down for being the deepest, narrowest canyon we saw this week. I never would have believed that a pair of Belgian horses could pull a wagon through these rocks! A doe paused to watch the parade go by. At one point, the left horse seemed stuck under the overhang. The driver said he simply had an itch he wanted to scratch on the rock. I did notice several streaks of blue paint on the walls where a wagon had come a leeetle too close! This was a family owned and operated business, and we were glad to see it, since so much of this area has gone the way of big corporations.

In the morning, we will try to pack everything back into the car, including all the rocks we have picked up. It all fit in a week ago, so it should go back now, right?

Hikers on the Trail

When we are on the trail, we usually don't run into many people, especially in the "off season" we've had this week in Wisconsin. If we find another hiker coming towards us, we nod and say hello pleasantly, while continuing to walk. We appreciate it if they bring their large dog to heel while we pass, as most do.

The Bluff Trail at Devil's Lake was a bit different today. We climbed more of those stone steps to reach the 500 foot high bluff trail, but this time the steps were surrounded by trees, and I could handle it. This is the first weekend after Labor Day, and many people where trying to get in another outing at the park while the weather is perfect. But some of them just irritated me no end. One guy wanted to dispute the name of the lake. "The Devil destroys things. I call it God's Lake," he said. We nodded and quickly continued climbing the stairs to the bluffs, having caught our breath a bit. He passed us, and we found him eagerly disputing scripture with his fellow hikers at the next lovely overlook. Without nodding, we went on. It went like this across the entire trail. Then we saw three young people, college age, and nodded to them. They were followed by another five, then another six, then I lost count. Since all of them carried notebooks and pencils, I asked one, "Are you from a geology class?" Bingo! Score one for Kathy. There were about 100 of them from the University of Wisconsin, on a field trip to see the rocks. They talked, without ceasing, both to each other and to friends on their cell phones. Some had music playing through earphones. "Why would someone come to this beautiful place and spend time talking on the phone?" We shook our heads in dismay. Then the Disputer showed up trying to preach to these students at another overlook. When he started talking about granite, and how it got there, I knew it was time to leave. (The rocks are quartzite, not granite.) The students didn't quite know how to wiggle out. We come to Nature to relax, to put our lives in perspective. Today it was a struggle, but we managed with the help of our friends. How often do you get to take photos of vultures from above? I threw away lots and lots of blurry vulture pictures along with empty sky pictures. When vultures fly at your eye level, you realize how fast they are soaring without flapping a bit. I'm feeling better already, encouraged by the vultures to take the high path, and not let lower things irritate me. Silence is worth everything. You can rise above things that bother you.

Since our visit here a mere three days ago, it seems that autumn has set in. The False Solomon Seal leaves fade to yellow, against the crimson of their berries. Other leaves turn gold and yellow, while more merely look wilted and ready to fall of without changing color at all. The seasons move as they should, no matter who hikes on the trail, whether anyone appreciates them or not. It's just what they do.

Down on the lake, we saw a few crows in a dead tree, while a Kingfisher darted about, finally landing farther away than we could photograph. We quietly walked towards it, taking shots every few steps. You guessed it, we approached its comfort zone, even though we were still at least 50-60 feet away from its branch overhanging the water, and it flew off. When something gets too close, just fly away, it seemed to say. There are other fish in the lake.

The Tumbled Rock Trail along the lake water has an asphalt path that winds and disappears without notice. How anyone ever got hot asphalt in between these boulders to form this trail is beyond me! It must have all been done by hand, since the trail is too small for machinery to traverse. Perseverance pays. Just keep on keepin' on, even then the trail is hard to find. The quartzite rocks are covered with lichens where the sun shines, but if you bend over a bit you see marvelous swirls of color, laid down by oceans so long ago I can't even guess how old they are. Sometimes only a tree or another boulder seems to restrain a huge rock from falling to the water. Imagine having to carry that weight and responsibility on your shoulders for thousands of years. You think you've got it tough, cookie? Things could be lots worse.

Our last friend was a turtle sunning himself on a rock. Get tough, he seemed to say. Just let things roll of your shell and turn your back on those folks who would annoy you. The lake and the sun are still here. Just chill out and don't bother making judgments about other people. It doesn't help you, and it certainly won't affect them.