In the Right Place: Return of the Royals

I finally found where our Monarchs have been hiding, including this one sipping from a common milkweed bloom. I now can check Monarchs off my 2023 “Must See” list. Yet, I wonder how long these royal insects will remain able to make the long trip here (in sequential waves).

Among other obstacles, common milkweed habitats are disappearing as more and more land is developed. That plant, Asclepias syriaca, is critical to the Monarchs’ propagation cycle. Here’s a closer look at it:

Last year, migrating Monarchs were put on the Red List of endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Those migrating Monarchs are the ones that we have here (Danaus plexippus plexippus), which are a subspecies of the non-migratory Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) that mostly stay in southern Mexico, Central America, northern South America, and the Caribbean. 

According to last year’s IUCN announcement, the migratory Monarch population has shrunk by between 22 and 72 percent (depending on area) over the past decade, primarily due to man-made causes, including milkweed habitat loss, pesticides, and climate change. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 25, 2023.)

In the Right Place: And in the Right Light

When it’s calm during a good sunset and the tide is right, our moored fishing vessels seemingly come to the golden light to have their bruises blessed. That’s one of the better times to see the character of these hard-working boats.

News reports indicate that the lobstering season is off to a slow start – not really good, not really bad – although supermarket and restaurant prices for the tasty crustaceans reportedly are not quite as high as they were at this time last year.

Nonetheless, it’s early in the season and the lobsters haven’t finished growing and shedding. It may be that good times are still to come. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 23, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Osprey Nest Report 10

The three nestlings continue to grow at that miraculously fast rate that some big raptors have to achieve to be ready for a long fall migration. Here you see Harriet returning home with new wall decorations:

She’s spending more time away from the nest, now that David (foreground nestling), Ricky (middle) and June (looking at Mom) are big enough to give predators second thoughts. Ozzie, a good Dad, still brings home the food.

The three fledglings already are trying out their wings in place, especially the two biggest/oldest, David and Ricky. They flap and flap and flap, raising themselves inches above the nest. Here’s David and Ricky flapping away and Harriet looking on approvingly:

Soon they’ll be helicoptering 10 feet above the nest and, after those yo-yo-like test flights, suddenly veering off on that first long (probably exciting and scary) flight. Those initial solos often result in crash landings in the surrounding trees as the youngsters work on acquiring that exquisite sense of balance and coordination that Ospreys get. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 23, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Late?

It seems that many of my favorite butterflies haven’t arrived here yet. Among those I’m awaiting are Monarchs, Swallowtails, and Painted Ladies, but maybe I haven’t been traveling in the right circles. I did catch sight of this subtlely-tailored little creature, which I think is a Northern Pearly Eye (Enodia anthedon):

I’ve also seen a few White Admirals (Basilarchia arthemis):

I guess I’m going to have to spend more time among the milkweed. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on June 9 [Pearly Eye] and 19 [Admiral], 2023.)

In the Right Place: Seeing Red, in Bunches

Bunchberries are fruiting now. These plants have been thriving in the relatively cool and wet weather that we’ve been having here lately. Elsewhere, they’re in trouble. They’re reportedly endangered in Illinois, Indiana, and Maryland, and are listed as threatened in Iowa.

The plant’s fruits, which are tight clusters (“bunches”) of red berries, apparently are a good source of pectin. Native Americans in Maine reportedly ate the fruits raw, used them in puddings and sauces, dried them for winter use, and used an infusion of the plant’s leaves as a purging tea. Among other wildlife, bunchberry fruits are eaten by American Black Bears, Cottontails and Snowshoe Hares and Eastern Chipmunks.

This wildflower grows in mixed woods and bogs and is one of the few members of the dogwood family that is a creeping groundcover and not a tree or shrub. In some good-growing areas, Bunchberry will colonize a large area:

The plant (Cornus canadensis) reportedly also is commonly called Pudding Berry, Crackerberry, Dwarf Cornel, Dwarf Dogwood, Creeping Dogwood, Canadian Bunchberry, Dogwood Bunchberry, and Bunchberry Dogwood. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 21, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Bright Interlude

Yesterday, we had a full day of sun for the first time in several weeks and – better yet -- the sun-colored “Heritage” came to enjoy it with us as a wonderful bonus. (Of course, we’re back to dank and dismal fog as I write this, but that’s another story.)

The sleek schooner overnighted and her passengers rowed ashore Thursday to tour the WoodenBoat Campus and rowed back to their vessel about an hour later. Her yawl boat also came ashore to pick up non-rowers. Meanwhile, boats from WBS sailing classes glided by and provided a sense of size proportions.

Near mid-day, the mainsail, topsail, and foresail went up and Heritage weighed anchor.

She turned around, picked up a following wind, let fly two jibs (forward sails), and sailed north. One of the passengers told me that she was going to try to reach the Sedgewick-Little Deer Isle Bridge before high tide so that the tall schooner had room to slip under the bridge.

The “Heritage” hails from Rockland, Maine, and is one of our largest schooners; she’s 145 feet long counting bowsprit with a 24-foot beam (widest part). She’s also advertised as our “newest” coastal cruiser, having been built in 1983 for the tourist trade. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 20, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Moments of Clarity

When the fog momentarily lifts and there is no wind and no sun, our harbor waters can turn black and the stillness can be joltingly clear. Yesterday was like that before a hazy sun appeared in the afternoon:

However, when the fog lays heavily on us for hours – which it has for most of the days during the past two weeks – it can be “pretty tiring” for our fishermen, according to one of our seasoned lobster boat captains who has been going out in the exceedingly poor visibility: “It makes your head tired staring into the radar all day.”

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 19, 2023.

In the Right Place: Not So Outward Bound

Bad fog and apparent resupply needs yesterday morning turned the tough-it-out Outward Bound Maine sailing program into a wait-it-out event in our Naskeag Harbor. As you probably know, Outward Bound (OB) conducts challenging adventures designed to help troubled teenagers and others by increasing self-esteem, self-reliance, concern for others, and care for the environment.

Above, you see the OB vessel “Sally Drew” being secured just after she came ashore and most of the teenaged crew went off to rest on the beach. She apparently is a standard OB-commissioned Hurricane Island wooden pulling boat/sailing ketch.

These double-ended vessels are 30 feet long with a beam (widest part) of 8 feet. They have eight rowing stations (four per side) for use when in the rowing phases of their program and two sails that are sprit-rigged as a ketch. (A sprit is a diagonal spar that helps the mast support a four-sided sail.) The boats are “open vessels” in that they have no cabins or permanent shelters, although tarps can provide needed protection.

(Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 18, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Games

Here you see fog creeping along Flye Point ridge yesterday. We’ve had far too much fog and rain this summer for my comfort. 

However, if you let your imagination loose a bit, you can play mental games with fog scenes, turning reality into illusion, certainty into doubt, and happy barns into brooding ones. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on June 17, 2023.)

In the Right Place: WTD Status Report

It must be summer: all the gray-coated, white-tailed deer are now red-jacketed, white-tailed deer; they’ve apparently all molted away their darker winter coats. “Our” herd looks very healthy.

Nonetheless, their brighter appearance has not stopped them from invading the garden. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 9, 2023.)

In the Right Place: The Fog of History

Here’s something that you don’t see every day: an Isles of Scilly pilot cutter. She’s the 60-foot working replica “Hesper,” waiting for the dawn fog to clear in Great Cove before starting a four-day cruise, which ended back here today. During that cruise, she was the classroom for a WoodenBoat School course on “Coastal Cruising Seamanship” and an iconic reminder of an interesting period in maritime history.

The Scilly (“SIL-ee”) Islands lie off the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England, in the midst of perhaps the most popular sailing approaches to England in the 19th Century. But it was treacherous sailing for the many tall sailing ships trying to avoid the area’s reefs and ragged coastlines.

The seamen of the Islands became famous for their courageous and competitive efforts to travel out to the incoming ships and pilot the sail-powered visitors through. By tradition, the first pilot to reach a vessel won the contract to guide that vessel safely to a harbor.

Some pilots used gig boats to row out to near-in vessels, others used fast and maneuverable “pilot cutters” such as “Hesper” to reach the vessels that were farther out in the Atlantic Ocean. The peak period for pilot cutters reportedly was between 1830 and 1860, when Scillies’ St. Mary’s Sound often was full of large sailing vessels waiting for a fair wind to continue to London or Liverpool.

“Hesper” (meaning morning star), now out of Camden, Maine, was built in 2004 at Queek Quay, Cornwall, by famed pilot cutter shipwright Luke Powell. She’s one of nine that he’s built. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 13, 2023.) By the way, Great Cove is totally socked in fog as I write.

In the Right Place: Osprey Nest Report 9

There was an amazing discovery this week: Ozzie and Harriet have a THIRD, previously unseen, nestling! I don’t know how I missed it. This shy bird apparently is the last born, hence the smallest. Per our protocol, she’ll be called June, the apparent month of her birth. Thus, in order of birth and size, the red-eyed nestlings are being called David, Ricky, and June for discussion purposes.

Above you see Ozzie serving breakfast to the nest this week. One of the three nestlings is visible; the two others are obscured by Harriet. Ozzie’s been delivering food daily since Harriet started brooding. He often flies to a nearby spruce-top after delivery and proudly oversees the family feast:

Although the nestlings do pick at the delivered fish, Harriet also still feeds them bits of it from time to time, especially June who is least developed and begs a lot:

The youngsters are growing very fast, but they need to do so; they’ll be migrating many miles in about two months. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 13, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Weeds of Prey

This composite image appears in my monthly column in the current Ellsworth American.

To read the column, which takes a different look at weeds in general and hawkweed in particular, click here: http://www.5backroad.com/montly-column

In the Right Place: Soaking It Up

We’ve been getting some sun in the past couple of days and we’re not the only ones grateful for it. The painted turtles in our ponds have been out soaking up that sun at every opportunity, even when it’s weak and a sometimes thing.

Being cold-blooded (“ectothermic”), turtle body temperatures are determined by their environment. They must maintain an internal temperature of between 63 and 73 degrees (F) to be active, according to reports. Basking in the sun, especially on a surface that warms up below them, is a principal way that PTs and other wild turtles can maintain enough heat to be active.

The heat that they absorb increases their metabolism, helps them digest, and induces males to produce sperm, researchers have found. The sunlight also strengthens their shells, attacks algae that can cause infection, and enables turtles to produce vitamin D 3, which is needed for the absorption of calcium used in structural growth. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 11, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Sadness Symbols

Poppies are in abundance here now, thriving on the almost daily fog and rain that we’ve been getting. Red poppies have come to symbolize the blood shed by soldiers in battle and often are used to memorialize such soldiers or veterans in general.

There are several theories about the origin of the poppy’s soldier remembrance tradition. The leading one appears to be that it began after publication of the popular and poignant poem “In Flanders Fields,” by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. He was a Canadian physician and poet who reportedly wrote the poem while he was serving in a field hospital on the front lines during World War I in Flanders (northern Belgium).

The short poem, which begins and ends with images of poppies blowing among the many rows of grave-marking crosses, is quite moving. If you want to read it, click this: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 11, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Waxies

Our wild mushroom season usually begins in earnest in late June or early July and lasts until fall or early winter, depending on the weather. The excessive fog and rain that we’ve received during this spring and early summer may herald a bumper crop.

As of now, we’re seeing plenty of waxy cap mushrooms, including the small scarlet waxies (Hygrophorus coccineus) shown above, which are hard to miss. (At least I think that they’re scarlet waxy caps; I’m not confident identifying fungi.) We’re also seeing plenty of what I think are golden waxy caps (Hygrophorus flavescens):

When it comes to waxy caps, even the experts are having problems identifying them, now that DNA testing is proving old assumptions wrong. For example, not all waxy caps are waxy (or sticky or slimy) to the touch, but that’s the least of the identification difficulties.

MushroomExpert.com, currently reports that, “Answering the question ‘What are the North American waxy cap species and how to tell them apart?’ will require many years, many studies, many thorough and well-documented collections ….” (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 9, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Coping and Care

Some ancient apple trees just hang in there as best they can, producing leaves, flowers, and eventually some fruit, despite the most catastrophic experiences. Fog is the least of their troubles.

Many abandoned apple trees don’t last as long as the ones shown here. The trees shown here, however, have the good fortune of living on the WoodenBoat Campus, where they’re cared for. Based on the year that the Campus property was developed for its original private owner (who reportedly planted apple trees), these trees are more than 100 years old. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 7, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Death in the Air

A blur flashed outside one of our second-floor windows on Friday and suddenly stopped less than 100 feet from me at about my eye level. It resolved itself into this handsome devil on the hunt.

He’s a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk who scanned the area for a few minutes, spotted something below, and swooped down, returning to a blur. (Sex assumed.)

Cooper’s Hawks are recovering well from devastating losses in the first half of the last century, when many were shot on sight. You know why they were slaughtered if you know that their other most common name is “chicken hawk.” There are reports in Edward Howe Forbush’s treatise of these birds swooping down with blinding speed and plucking a chicken as the very nearby farmer watched in frustration. (The bird was named officially in 1828 in honor of the ornithologist William Cooper; its scientific name is Accipiter cooperii.)

To be sure, Cooper’s are extraordinarily efficient predators, but they take far fewer chickens than they do small- to medium-sized wild birds and such occasional prey as small mammals and snakes. Their hunting prowess is legendary and the subject of one of Forbush’s most dramatic descriptions:

“When the ‘Cooper’s’ loud ‘cucks’ ring through the sunny, leafy woods …, the hush of death pervades everything. All erstwhile cheerful thrushes and warblers become still and silent. The ‘Cooper’s’ fierce ‘cucks’ are the most merciless sounds of our summer woods. There is indeed death in the air.” Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, II (1927). (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 7, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Rain and Sun

Being at a pond in a light summer rain often is not only pleasing to the eye, it can be symphonic to the ear – the fat raindrops hitting different surfaces can sound like harps and plucked violins, the breezes making the cat tails swish, the frogs playing double bass and the red-winged blackbirds playing muted trumpets ….

The performance is made complete after a brief shower, when the sun returns and the water lilies yield themselves fully to it. That’s always a stunning encore.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 2 and 5, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Osprey Nest Report 8

I’m virtually certain that Ozzie and Harriet have raised only two nestlings this year. So, per our Nelson Family protocol, the oldest youngster will be named David and the other will be named Ricky for discussion purposes. That’s David on the left complaining.

The nestlings seem to be able to feed themselves now. I see them picking at the fish that Ozzie drops off regularly; I haven’t seen Harriet feeding them pieces in more than a week. Harriet takes more breaks lately, flying off the nest and often returning with some new decoration for the family home:

Yesterday, however, she spent much of the morning sitting on the nest with wings out to shade David and Ricky from the hot sun. At times, she looked like an eagle on a quarter.

Ozzie now often lazes at the top of a tall spruce near the nest, just contentedly standing guard. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 5 and 6, 2023.)