The In-Between Season

It is late summer and with the barest of hints, the seasons begin to blend one into the other so that when I look up from treading the trail with Amos, I think I notice some small change, a falling leaf, a shift of light. I can see a little more of the scaffold of the forest. The old Dogwoods in the meadow always catch my attention when the crickets go full chorus at their loudest. These are survivors of blights and fungal attacks and so are twisted and gnarly and tough.  

Mennonite couple on a woods walk in early September.

Another week goes by and now I am sure of it - autumn is on the doorstep. Cooler nights sweep in with a cold front that seems to shove all things hot and humid out to sea. The Walnut in the bottom of the yard is simultaneously turning yellow and shedding leaves. Birds begin their southerly migrations. The Catbirds are gone. I already miss them. I'm drawn to almost daily walks on the game lands and my local state park, Susquehannock.

Bjerkandera adusta, a common bracket fungi on hardwood logs.

I was hiking with family this weekend on the C&O Canal, the next section of our end-to-end walk from Washington D.C. to Cumberland, MD. While we chatted about things happening in our lives, we stopped frequently to remark about sounds and colors. "This is becoming my favorite time," said my niece, "the in-between summer and fall."  We noticed low light by late afternoon and by five p.m.,  Barred Owls echoed through the swamps at McKee Besher Wildlife Management Area, our destination for the day.  We slowed our walk to take in the setting sun and the darkening lowland woods  

Turkey Tail, Trametes versicolor, another common autumn bracket fungi. 

The in-between time is subtle yet exciting. The PA Game Commission has turned on its popular live streaming Elk Cam up in Elk County and I bookmark it on my computer anticipating the action of the rut. As I write this post, there is a  streaming chorus of field crickets and conversational crows in a cut-cover corn field and I stop what I'm doing to take a scan of the woods edge. I go back to my writing when a deep grunt erupts from the woods and I quickly switch tabs to take a look as the camera scans the clearing. Elk? Bear? I make my annual vow to get up there and go elk watching on those amazing public lands. 

Old blazes mark a well-trodden trail at Susquehannock State Park. 

Since our treks to Hawk Mountain, I've seen a dozen Coopers Hawks shoot through the woods on my walks.  I've  heard as many Red-shouldered and Red-tailed Hawks. At night Screech Owls whinny and Lightning Bugs flicker their very last. The last flash I noted was Thursday night. None since. Thistles, Fleabanes, and Milkweed have gone to seed.  Sunflower heads are drooping and nodding in the garden and sparkle with Goldfinches picking seeds. I filled my feeders for the first time since late spring. Before I could get to the porch,  a Red-Bellied Woodpecker and her two offspring came right away to investigate. 

Painted rock sits peacefully in a tree cricket-filled forest. 

The Red-Bellied Woodpecker was teaching her young ones to take seeds from the feeder. She was patient and tender and allowed me to stand nearby as she demonstrated how to chose a seed, crack it, and discard the shells. She chittered to them as they perfected their take-and-break method. I could hear the crackle of sunflower seeds and watched white flakes of shell drop to the grass. The scene was not the electric red and yellow of mid-October, nor the sizzle and drench of a hot humid day, but it has a tender energy that defines this in-between time of transition. 

White Wood Aster

Great Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica

Walking Amos in game lands over in Holtwood, I took in the big view and noted the colors and sounds of the meadows. Grasshoppers were everywhere, rasping and chewing, exploding up just as my boot touched the ground with a startling snap and clatter of wings. There are no complex algorithms or mechanized process to consider, just the shortening of days and the timed responses to shifts in the photoperiod to elicit the first elk bugle of the year, for Fleabane to burst its encapsulated seed head, and to ignite this chorus of insect song and grasshopper profusion so loud I can hardly hear a single bird call. There are no elk here, but I wish there were. I vow again to make the journey north - and soon.

Seedheads burst open, ready to catch a breeze.

The in-between is not all peace and cricket song, however.  Black bears are increasingly emboldened by the quick pickings in the orchard and farm yard. Winter is coming and they are beginning to feed heavily, greedily, on anything they can rustle up - even if it's on the front porch. It's best to bring in the bird feeders at night. Hawks leave piles of feathers where they've picked off a neo-tropical migrant near the feeder station. With each brush of a hurricane from the south or swift moving front from the west,  there are new obstacles to climb over or through as newly windthrown trees and or broken limbs lay across the trail. These are the exclamation points in an otherwise slow turning of September's transition.

In a time that is generally quiet, and for some, spiritual, yet we are challenged to accept the harshness of nature along with the beauty. We live in an altered state of nature, a condition born of hundreds of years of human management and so it's easy to feel settled and peaceful. But the struggle for winter's survival begins now and in earnest, no matter how simplified we've made the landscape. People who live close to the land, however, do not ignore subtle signals and they are busy preparing,  taking inventory, and stocking up. Venison will be in the freezer by Christmas. Canned vegetables are filling the pantry now. Refilled water jugs are stowed out of sight for when the power goes out come winter storms. 

Goldenrod signals the time to prepare.

Most of us live in a de-natured world. We no longer fear our natural environment so it doesn't figure into modern living.  Nothing much is left in our human-controlled landscape that could eat us, so other than threats of severe weather, natural environment is relegated to the background. Here on the game lands, however, I see another subtle sign of a season's turning - the presence of a man and his hunting dog, both outfitted in blaze orange but without a gun for today is Sunday. Soon we are chatting as our dogs sniff and wag and greet. 

Walking Amos in the game lands.

It has become something of a fall tradition that we walk our dogs on Sunday mornings and eventually cross paths.  His yellow lab, Cory, stands patiently while coonhound Amos bounces all around. Cory's dad catches me up on all things Game Commission and he's not too happy about a recent change.  As frustrating as the regulations are to him, however, he says he's glad we have so much public hunting land to use. He volunteers with a fish and game club to help clear trails here and he knows how precious this landscape is. "Seems like every time I turn around, Lancaster County is turning another farm into a subdivision."  

Hairy Thoroughwort and Clubmoss. 

At the end of the 19th century, Pennsylvania's landscapes looked very different. Most forests had been logged off. Farmlands, much of it degraded and exhausted, took the place of the woods. Deer were rare. Elk and bear and mountain lion had been hunted to extinction. The Game Commission formed out of the State Sportsman Association in an attempt to stop the wastage and begin the process of restoring habitat and populations of game.  By 1897 laws and regulations were enacted to protect what little was left but with an eye to the future. Enforcing those new laws was dangerous work. Nearly twenty wardens were shot and killed by 1905. That same year the PGC was given the task to acquire and secure as conservation acreage and twenty game lands were established. Now there are 335 designated conservation areas protecting 1.5 million acres for regulated public hunting, the protection of natural heritage, and the increase of biodiversity. 

From the Hawk Watch Overlook, Susquehannock State Park

After our game lands visit, Amos and I stopped by Susquehannock State Park and wander out to the overlook where a pair of hawk spotters had set up their scopes and cameras. I asked about the early count so far. I'm told there have been a few osprey and quite a few hawks. The spotter showed me her clipboard. I mentioned I'd been up to Hawk Mountain a few weekends in a row recently. "Aren't we lucky?" she says, "To be able to catch the early stream of migrants?" As I look upriver across the Susquehanna Valley I am thankful, too, that we have so much protected land - almost everything thing in my view is conservation land. The trees looked a little yellower and the sky heavy with cold front squall clouds, subtle signs of changes to come. 

Notes:

My niece and I marveled at the past-bloom sunflower fields at McKee Beshers Wildlife Management Area near the C&O Canal. Acres of heavy, nodding heads of sunflower seeds made for the biggest feeding station I've ever seen. 

 https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/publiclands/central/sunflowers.aspx

PA River Road and Susquehannock State Park: Close to Home, Week 3

This is the third Saturday of stay-at-home. Early on, I took a tea cup and traced a circle around where I live on a map of York County. This I designated my ten mile radius for a close-to-home range of exploration, food shopping, and farm store. So far so good. As the weeks have rolled by (who staying at home is keeping track of time anyway?)  I am encountering some not-so-nice effects of overuse of our area trails, no matter how remote they may be. There are way more people in parks with some of them coming from away, not so close to home. Crowded parking lots. Some trail damage. Lots of trash, which means litter picking on my daily walks.

Greening up!

One day this week I had a raft of online meetings that started early and couldn't get out for a walk until 4pm. I pulled into my local state park across the river and found this normally empty park now crowded. People flowed up and down the two-mile-long paved entrance road in a procession of families, bikes, joggers, some with dogs on leashes, others with dogs off leashes. Amos is always leashed but I was concerned with walking the road because of the other dogs running free. As goofy as he is, he can sometimes get aggressive/protective when strange dogs lunge or taunt, even when they are leashed.  Instead, I beat feet to the farthest trailhead from the road and hiked a solid three miles without encountering another soul.

Tulip Poplar

As I write this, a friend has posted to the Thousand Steps FB page that her son was bitten today by an off leash dog on that popular hiking trail. Unable to find the owners to confirm that its shots are up to date, she is now faced with having to take her boy into a crowded hospital for treatment. She is pleading online for anyone belonging to any of our hiking groups on FB and other social media to help her find the owners. She posted a picture of the back of her son's arm, bruised and indented with bite marks as the dog came at him from behind. She said the trail was crowded and no one she asked seemed to know who it belonged to.

Bloodroot in the morning.

Mayapple ready to unfurl.

Fiddlehead of a wood fern.

Amos is a big, athletic black-and-tan coonhound. He and I both need our walks. Without a solid few miles each day he gets antsy and sometimes gets in trouble at home trying to work out his energy (i.e. disemboweling cushions and pillows!) Without my own three miles a day, which I consider my mental health medicine, I can get a little down and gloomy. So no matter the weather we've always walked everyday, often out early walking the country roads just out the front door. Lately this has been less dangerous because there has been so little work traffic to contend with. The river is just six miles away as the crow flies and in the predawn I can hear the water flowing over the dam at Holtwood, the CSX train rumbling along in the river valley, and every rooster on every farm around. So that's a plus.

Bluebells.

As the week wore on, however, I was wearing down from so much time attending online meetings, conference calls, and reading the daily deluge of emails. I decided we would get up a little earlier in the dark and drive down to the River Road for our three to five mile out-and-backs on the white gravel road which is easy to see in the predawn light and doesn't have any traffic at all, save for a few joggers.  Not much opportunity for flower photography, but the frogs calling and early bird song were easy trade offs. What I noticed in the light of my headlamp however was an increased amount of roadside trash. Seems a lot of folks have discovered our beloved River Road and feel it is easier to pitch the soda bottles and chip bags out the window than pack it home. I tied a plastic bag to Amos' harness and filled it with snack trash in the last mile back to the car.

Female Bluebird tending her nest.

Male Bluebird guarding the nest box. 

Seems to me there are a lot of folks now discovering these beautiful areas close-to-home who could use a little primer on Leave No Trace. Judging by the number of cigarette butts I've picked up - with gloves on, always - there are a lot of nervous and stressed out people as well. In all my years of walking this road, I can't recall a time when there has been so much litter. I told Amos we would come back prepared to litter pick from here on out.

Lichen woods.

I met up with an early morning jogger who slowed down to say hello to Amos. "Where are all these people coming from?" she asked. I didn't have a clue. When we returned to the car after our out-and-back I found the parking area crammed with cars by 8am - on a Thursday. We litter picked the parking area and placed dropped sunglasses, a dropped cell phone, and a dropped set of car keys on the gate post. People sure do drop a lot.

Bloodroot in bloom.

Today for our Saturday hike, Amos wore his backpack with the two saddle bags. We walked the River Road and litter picked the road filling one side bag, then climbed on to the Mason Dixon Trail at the dam and hiked up into the hills for a short section hike back to the car. By the time we arrived back to the car, his second bag was stuffed full.

Dutchman Breeches 

The Mason Dixon Trail is a designated long distance hiking trail that runs two hundred miles from Chadds Ford, PA, to intersect the Appalachian Trail at Whiskey Springs. There is one "official" wilderness camping spot on our local section at Lock 12 and when Amos and I reached it we found it  trashed. I didn't have another bag with me so I crammed what I could into Amos' now overflowing backpack. Rather than give a disgusting inventory of what we found, let's just say that whoever has camped here this week has an ample supply of toilet paper, cigars, Clorox wipes, and Billy Bob's Beef Jerky.

Litter picking on the Mason Dixon Trail - Amos' backpack is overflowing.

Add to that, the beautiful hemlock gorge has some trail damage as people who have no idea what switchbacks are for have cut straight up and down the steep ravine bypassing the zig-zag trail. Given a hard day of rain, the soft soils of the hemlock woods will quickly wash out and create a gash where people have bushwhacked. With a few more days of heavy rain, which is becoming the norm for this area, the gash will become a v-cut ravine. Our trail club chapter will have a ton of work to do in this one short section just to stop the wash outs and build rails to keep people on the switchbacks.  I need to sign up for some trail crew days...

Holtwood Dam from the MDT

All in all,  I am happy that people are taking walks and finding places that help calm and restore them. Lord knows we need it now more than ever. As we continued along the ridge and met people coming the other way (with their unleashed dogs) I politely asked  them - as I stepped carefully off trail so they could pass six feet away - where they were from. I was surprised to hear not a single local. Instead, I learned that people had come from Reading PA, Baltimore MD, Newark DE, and Wildwood (!) NJ. Wait, I thought, what happened to staying close-to-home?! I wished them all a happy hike and asked if they could remember pack out what they pack in. Everyone was very nice. It was wonderful to talk to folks about how they were spending their time, but one hiker said he is required to go in for work as he is a UPS driver. Thank you! Thank you!

Coonhound on the summit with his garbage haul for the day. 

By the time Amos and I descended the trail back to River Road, there were cars lined up at the trail head parked on both shoulders, and more trash, small things really like juice box straws and candy wrappers.  The small parking area a mile further where I had parked was jammed. Some one else had been litter picking and left their collection bag tied to the gate. I grabbed that too since I know there are no maintenance crews to collect it out here. But I thanked them anyway, whoever they were, for the effort and for caring about our River Road.

PA: Disappearing Act at Susquehannock State Park

Took a sneaky break to relieve some holiday stress with a  short drive across the river to see what I could find. Sometimes you just have to have that woods walk. My go-to place is Susquehannock State Park for a few hours roaming around with my coonhound, Bug. No one was there. No one even knew where I was. It was like we disappeared.

Pine Tree Trail has no more pine trees.

There are a few hemlocks and a few white pines left up on the plateau, which is windy and often cold, but for the most part these old hills have transitioned back into mixed hardwoods since farming was abandoned here in the 1950s. The land has a rich farming history that is almost hidden by the forest now. A few foundations can be seen here and there, but the really cool story is about what can't be seen. This land has hidden a lot of people. 

Straight-up tulip tree trucks all of the same age class compete for sun.

Mixed among the poplars were lots of old knotty wild cherry and a few yellow birch. American holly trees add green to the golden landscape and an understory of spicebush, sasafrass, and witch hazel grows thick in the hollows below. Old woods roads climb in and out of the steep valley, but eventually they all lead back to the farmstead at the top.

Former pasture contains old cattle trails incised into the hill.

This is a great time to observe the scaffolding of the forest - to see the structure of trunks, limbs and vines that use them for support. I found several old bird nests in the understory lined with fibers pulled from wild grape vines, and then, rounding Pine Tree Trail to connect with Holly Trail, I found the source of the building material - two enormous shaggy old grape vines grown high into their support tree's limbs, a dead tulip poplar. Each vine was 6" across at shoulder height and I could see where animals and bird had mined the bark for nest and den material. Squirrels love to strip off long, fat ribbons of vine bark for the interiors of their tree cavity dens, while songbirds birds pull finer lengths to weave into their cup-shaped nests. In earlier times, grapevine fiber was used to make egg baskets and its thinner vines braided for rope and cord.

Massive wild grape vines will collapse when this dead tulip tree comes down.

Sunset in the tulip poplar woods.

At the base of the great tulip trees were the remains of seed pods and single-bladed seeds spread on wind from great heights. As Bug rooted around the base of the parent trees she uncovered some late season fungi, protected from recent hard frosts by the thick blanket of red oak, beech, and poplar leaves. She found where squirrels and deer had uncovered several more to eat, but this one went undetected until she found it.

Bug nosed this small Bolete mushroom out of the fresh leaf litter.

Observing the mushroom, I was reminded of the vast underground network of mycelium beneath my feet and Bug's paws. This massive network of interconnected tree rootlets, fungal filaments, and the nutrients and salts they share between fungi and tree species binds together the entire forest around us. This network functions, too, as a communications system for tree-to-tree and tree-to-forest signals that warn of insect attacks, the spread of diseases, and shortages of essential foods.

A weathered polypore lays a bit frost-wilted on a downed cherry limb but has a fine growth of algae.

Oak Polypore on a stump.

Pores on the underside of a bracket fungi.

At ground level the work of forest recycling is astounding. Fallen limbs are returned to the soil as bracket fungi break them apart. Stumps of large trees crumble, shot through with black and white mycelium strands. Leaves compact to form a dense layer of compost that will disassemble into forest duff over the winter. With the help of snow mold, the fresh leaves of today will be black and friable by mid-winter. Voles and mice have begun their seed storing and bluejays are busy burying acorns, so the ground is pitted with holes and tunnels. Runners of clubmoss and rhizomes of bracken fern colonies penetrate the duff to create a well-aerated upper layer.  

Ground pine, a clubmoss species of Lycopodium shimmers in a colony carpet of beech leaves.

When dinosaurs roamed this region, long before there were river hills to climb, clubmosses were the dominate tree form, towering fifty to a hundred feet high. Thousands of species grew when Pennsylvania was covered by low, humid swamps - more like jungles - that contained giant dragonflies, enormous millipedes, reptiles, amphibians, and the ancestors of modern birds.

Covered in leafy scales, this small clubmoss is one among hundreds.

The great Pennsylvania Carboniferous swamps became the great Pennsylvania coalfields. The ferns and clubmoss I see today are distantly related to those ancient forests. Most of our modern species evolved only a million years ago, long after colliding continents doomed the interior jungles by raising the mountains that blocked atmospheric moisture. Some of the most recently evolved species of bracken, common in both the U.K. and North America, developed terrific poisons, ecdysones, that cause munching insects to die after ingesting a few meals of fern leaf. The poison causes them to molt prematurely. I learned this in May while hiking Hadrian's Wall across Northern England that Roman stable hands harvested bracken as bedding for cavalry horses. Archeologists discovered stables with layered floors of bracken and hundreds of thousands of pupae shells of stable fly beneath each layer.  I know of an Amish farmer near home across the river who harvests bracken from his woods each spring and uses it to control flies in his dairy barn.

Bracken fern and Christmas fern remain green after other ferns have died back.

As we wandered back up the hill, connecting with the Spring Trail, the low sun illuminated a leafy hillside to reveal some tiny red oaks. I moved the leaves away and found that all of them still remained attached to their acorn husks while a strong white taproot penetrated deeply into the ground below. Possibly "planted" by blue jays or squirrels, these young oaks still sport their leaves even after several hard frosts and shorter days. They are still trying to capture as much light and manufacture as much food as possible.

Anthocyanine interspersed with chlorophyll.

Anthocyanins are the pigment that create red in autumn leaves. It acts as a shield for the young leaf, protecting it from direct sunlight after the mature canopy above has dropped. This is important for the young oak in chilly climates since sunburn is a real threat to young leaves that are still actively moving food stores to the tap roots. There were still greenish patches of chlorophyll at work on each leaf of the dozens of young oaks. The low but bright sun was direct upon these oak nurseries where only a few weeks ago the hillside would have still been in shade. Sunscreen is a must!  

Emergent red oak, still holding tight to their acorns underground while thick taproots dig deep.

These young red oaks are still manufacturing food (greenish tint) but protected by sunscreen (reddish tint).

We passed the foundation of an old springhouse which Bug enjoyed very much. She loves stones walls and sniffs every crack and crevice. While I waited, I spied some dried Clintonia berries atop their stalks standing among the remains of Jack-in-the-Pulpit in the semi-wet soil.  There was so much to see (and smell), we could have just disappeared into the woods until dark, but there was work to be done at home and I was well enough rested and satisfied that it felt good to take the Spring Trail up to the hilltop.

Clintonia berries.

Back on top of the plateau, the trail ends at the back of the old stone farmhouse. Bug decided it was time for a break, so she laid down in the warm sun and rolled around the toasty leaves, long legs paddling the air. I admired the 1850 Landis home from the lawn. Matching interior brick chimneys encased in field stone walls, a very practical German way of building a home, must have radiated such warmth into the rooms. It's always windy up on the ridge, so I can imagine this home was a warm refuge for the dairy farmers and their sons coming in from the 4am milking! The most important part of this house to me, however, was the role it played right after it was built and through the Civil War. It was a safe house, a stopover on the Underground Railroad.

Landis House and stop on the Underground Railroad.

Jacob Shoff, the sixth owner of the farm, served as a "conductor" to bring people here for refuge after the dangerous Mason-Dixon boundary crossing and guided them safely onward towards Lancaster. The Landis family has just the right place to hide people. The cold cellar (similar to a spring house - it had water troughs for cooling milk and perishables) contained a walled-off preparation room with a fireplace, tables, chairs, bedding, and dry goods storage. It's said that this space could hold many people warm and dry during the day. Some of the old folks on this side of the river still refer to this place as "freedom hill" and hope that one day funding can be found to restore the house and tell its story. It's an important to story to tell, and given the year the house was constructed, important enough not to let it disappear.

 

In 1850, the year the Landis house was built, federal laws were changed that made it illegal to assist slaves to freedom.  Helping runaway slaves had already been illegal since 1793, but this new law enacted by Congress as the Fugitive Slave Law, required all local law enforcement and citizenry to hunt and catch anyone they suspected of being a runaway slave. The Landis family and Jacob Shoff, like dozens of Lancaster and York County conductors and safe houses , faced imprisonment for six months and steep fines up to $1000 if they were caught helping. The law encouraged the kidnapping of free blacks and increased opportunities for bribery. Despite the risks, however, "freedom hill" and the surrounding area provided safe passage to thousands of men, women, and children on their way north.