LBJs

*I need to find a recording of a Screech Owl call. The other night on the summit of Old Rag, we heard a trilling sound that brought all four of us up short. It sounded like it might be a bird or a frog--a single note, trilled for a second or two--but since it sounded nothing like the quavering whistle I've heard before from Screech Owls, I wrote it off as a frog. (It was obviously not any other sort of eastern owl's or nightjar's call.) But now it turns out that Screechers have a second call, what my National Geographic guide calls "a long single trill, all on one pitch." This needs more research.

*I am once again plugging away at Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, a book I've started several times before. It's billed as a book "in the spirit of Lewis Carroll," and it's both highly enjoyable and intellectually expanding. Unlike Carroll's work, however, it requires the reader to plug into its vocabulary and its discussion of various formal systems with a fair degree of concentration. On past attempts, I've had to put the book down for some reason or other and have gotten so derailed that I'd have had to start over--a bit demoralizing when one is in the midst of a 742-page book. I'm currently on page 162, so I'll have to keep at it a while yet.

*Speaking of Lewis Carroll-related materials, let me urge everyone to rush to the comics store and pick up the first issue of Volume II of Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The text feature at the back discusses many bizarre events around Britain, including the mysterious disappearance of one A.L., a little girl who vanished on a riverbank near Oxford, and the subsequent and ill-fated Bellman Expedition into the otherworldly hole which was discovered near the site. Wonderful.

*And speaking of LOEG, rumor has it that a film version is on the way, with retired adventurer Allan Quatermain to be played by (drum roll, please) Sean Connery. I call that a home run in the casting department. I still don't know who's up to play the other Leaguers, but my own suggestions would be: Mina Harker--Winona Ryder, Henry Jekyll--Steve Buscemi or David Hyde Pierce, Captain Nemo--Jonathan Pryce or Liam Neeson, Griffin--Gary Oldman or Tim Roth. I expect my freely-offered suggestions to be pointedly ignored by the Hollywood establishment.

*Today brings with it a difficult decision: do I try to go on a local group's weekly bike ride, or do I attend a lecture on string theory given by a former student who's interning at summer school? Realistically, it's my body that needs exercise more than my brain, but I was hoping I wouldn't have to make the choice.

*Oh my god! It's August! The summer is two-thirds over! I'm supposed to have done something!
9:34 AM

.................................

I have climbed only a few mountains in my life, but now there's one I've conquered both by day and by night. Yesterday I went on a night hike of Old Rag.

Old Rag is a bare-topped rocky peak that juts southeastward out of the main ridge of the Shenandoah National Park. Because its top is so rocky and broken, the mountain a) acquired its name (originally "Old Raggedy Mountain") and b) has become one of the eastern states' most popular hikes. I first climbed it about five years ago with our school's outdoor program and have been up it several more times, though I haven't always made it to the summit. Yesterday, at the urging of my colleague Paul, the four of us decided to climb the Ridge Trail, a steep ascent (2600 feet in about 2 miles) that's about an hour of walking switchback trails in the woods and an hour and a half of scrambling over rocks and up crevices. The scramble is by far the coolest part of the trip.

We started the climb before sunset, at about 7:00, and by the time we got about 45 minutes into the woods, I was already beat; I've climbed Old Rag before, but never in July, and thanks to Virginia's high humidity and heat, I was good and dehydrated. I actually felt light-headed a few times, but I swilled down almost all my water before we got to the scramble, figuring it would do more good in my system than out.

The good thing about stopping for water was that I spotted a young black bear while we were resting. It was about 30 feet up a tree, but the tree stood below the trail so that it was almost even with us. Paul snapped some pics, but I don't know if they'll come out well or not--it was pretty leafy up there. Our other two companions, Ryan and Jessica, were rapt; I'm not sure Jessica had seen a bear in the wild before. (I'd seen two on a hike of the SNP's northern Appalachian Trail section, but this was the first one I'd ever seen in a tree.)

By the time we reached the rock scramble, the sun had dipped behind the mountains, so we started grabbing rocks and clambering over them without direct sunlight. After reaching the first of the three rocky peaks and trying to locate our school to the east--we failed--we broke out the headlamps. The lamps were very cool & lightweight, smaller than a credit card but bright enough to show the trail in front of you for a good seven to ten feet. As the ascent got steeper, it became less of a walk and more of a climb, so the lights were necessary to find hand- and footholds Once or twice I had to back away from my usual get-leverage-and-pry-yourself-uphill method and simply bull my way up with my upper body. Considering how old and out-of-shape I'd been feeling earlier, it was a big confidence booster to be able to do that.

We hit the summit at about 9:45 and perched atop one of a circle of gigantic boulders to wolf down trail mix and water. The wind threatened to blow any loose gear off the mountain entirely, but I for one found the cooling effect more than welcome. The night sky was brilliantly clear, except for a band of haze around the horizon, and the Milky Way was broad and vivid. Since the moon hadn't risen yet, the brightest thing in the sky was Venus, which glowed in a positively uncanny way. We spotted shooting stars and a couple of satellites, but spent most of our time looking at constellations with Paul's star map and my binoculars. Scorpio hung huge and brilliant over the southern horizon; Cassiopeia to the northeast, Venus in the west. We felt as though we had guideposts on every side of us.

I learned several new tricks for finding stellar objects, including Arcuturus, the Northern Crown, the "horse and rider" in the Big Dipper, and the Andromeda Galaxy, which we couldn't quite see with the naked eye, but which showed up nicely blobby and blurry in the binoculars. "That makes three galaxies I've seen," said Paul, who spent some time in Chile last year and saw one of the Magellanic Clouds. Jessica, meanwhile, saw her first shooting star; she's twenty-one. I told her she had a good chance of seeing more over hte next two decades of her life and felt very old for a minute or two.

We rested for about an hour, then turned the lamps back on and scrambled down the other side of the mountain toward the local fire road. We spotted the reflective green eyes of a deer that was lying in the greenery a few yards away from the trail; it was eerily hard to identify, perhaps because it was so calm.

Once we got to the road, we turned off the lamps and proceeded mostly by feel. (I suggested going by taste or smell, but Paul rejected the idea out of hand.) When we reached the car at 1:00, we decided we were filthy and tired enough to need a quick dip in the icy waters of the Hughes River, which runs across the northern foot of Old Rag. Hard by the parking lot was a beautiful (if dark) pool at the bottom of a small waterfall. "Cold" does not do justice to the temperature of the river's mountain-sprung waters, but it was the perfect ending to the hike.

Well, actually, Paul's stopping by the Sheetz on the way home provided the perfect ending. I strode boldly through the doors, poured myself a thirty-ounce cherry Slurpee, and pounded it down before we got out of the parking lot again.

This morning I am very stiff and my feat are blistery and my hair looks ridiculous. I am in a stupidly happy mood.

7:27 AM

.................................

My birding life list now sits at 252 species. After picking up 40 species in Britain in 1999, I've slowed down my reckless pace a bit; in 2000, I spotted only eight new species (including one of my more spectacular acquisitions, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, one of a nesting pair in western Madison County). Last year I spotted only four--two on a camping trip in the Shenandoah National Park (Veery and Hooded Warbler) and two on a birding trip to the Back Bay NWR near Virgina Beach (Northern Pintail and American Bittern). With seven-twelfths of this year gone, I have yet to pick up a lifer, so perhaps it's time to take a more aggressive approach to this whole listing thing.

In less than eight months, I'll be going on sabbatical from school. Part of that time will be taken up in research, part in writing, and part in touring in support of The Verb To Bird when it finally comes out. The tour will involve traveling to parts of the country I've never visited, and that means I'll be heading into the ranges of a number of birds I've never seen. It just seems logical to take some time for birding while I'm in the neighborhood, right? Right.

So what should I look for?

I'll be traveling in the spring and/or summer, so northern birds that winter in the US will probably not be around for me to spot. That probably means I'll miss out on the Whooping Cranes, who'll probably be in Alberta by the time I head out. But there are plenty of other birds I'd love to see.

For example, I've seen every American species of heron except one: the Reddish Egret. I'd love to say I'd seen every member of the Ardeidae family, though some purists might insist I have to see "Wurdemann's Heron" and the "Great White Heron," both of which are unusual morphs of the Great Blue Heron. Either way, since the Reddish Egret, Wurdemann's and the GWH are all Florida natives, I could knock off all three with a trip to the Sunshine State. I could also pick up a few other odd species there--the Snail Kite, the Limpkin, or maybe even Florida's introduced population of Whooping Cranes.

The Southwest has dozens of species I'd love to see--the Cactus Wren, the Roadrunner, the Vermilion Flycatcher, the Red-faced Warbler--but I think the one I most long to spot is the gorgeous chocolate-and-chestnut Harris' Hawk. It's just one cool-looking bird.

California alone is going to require a whooooole lot of birding. My friend Mary once went west for a Latin symposium and got in a little birding on the side; she sent me back a postcard consisting of nothing but the names of the lifers she'd spotted. When she returned, she emphasized the need to carefully check out different terrains in the same general area; apparently the bird life differs radically with every change in elevation, foliage, or landform. Perhaps I'll start in Southern Cal and pick up a Ladder-backed Woodpecker, move into the central valley to spot a Yellow-billed Magpie, and move northward to see a Varied Thrush. One thing's for sure: I will be visiting the coast--I will have a Tufted Puffin.

But no matter what I seek out, I'm quite certain that the most interesting sight will be something unexpected--a bird whose presence comes as a complete surprise. And that's the way it should be. Birding is, after all, about seeing what's there, not finding what you seek. If a birder wants his every desire satisfied, he'd better give up birding; he'll get a lot more out of ordering from catalogues.
12:18 PM

.................................