Weather Predictions

The cool August and phone calls up here asking "where have all the Robins gone?" got me to thinking about winter already and what we are up against this year. If you believe the scientists, it is going to be drier and warmer this winter in the Northeast. If you believe the Farmer's Almanac, it is going to be colder and wetter. If you believe my luck, the weather will stink because we moved up on a hill last winter and it snowed and iced all winter. Unless we move...

People are looking for signs of an early winter and you don't have to look far- leaves are changing, birds are flocking and bears are raiding people's feeders. Maybe these are all normal occurrences this time of the year anyways. I think we get somewhat "excited" about winter because here winter is basically the only season that gives us the chance for something uniquely debilitating and people are horrified yet fascinated with debilitating. In the South they have hurricanes, in the West, earthquakes, the Midwest, tornadoes. We have snowstorms.

I am not ready for winter. I just took off the pounds I gained last winter. Apparently I am like little chipmunks and birds, putting on weight to keep warm and live off of all winter? Trouble is winter is not lean eating for me, but it seems to be a time of less activity. I do plan on snowshoeing more this winter than I did last if the Farmer's Almanac is right. Or winter hiking if NOAA is right. Either prediction works for me because either will require me to find a new winter coat and boots. :)

The Cornish Milk Snake

I have a friend that called one evening this past week, I'll call him Joe. Joe is a former Biologist that has defected from the "Science of Life" to Physics- the "Science of...Boring Stuff". OK, I'm sorry, that's not fair. I am probably a bit negatively biased about physics because I believe the only reason I passed physics in High School was because Mr. Steele, my teacher, let me clean his blackboards for extra credit. Seriously.

Back to Joe. Joe found a snake on his closed back porch. More correctly his wife found the snake and Joe came to the rescue. He then put the snake in a bucket and called me, leaving a message about his dilemma. He still has enough Biologist left in him that he was interested in what kind of snake he had and according to the results, he would release it in the proper place the next morning, far from his home. I called Joe back and asked some details about the snake- I found out it was small (about 12 inches), had a skinny silverish body with darker patterning, and, according to Joe, a large head. I told him, without seeing the snake, and knowing where he found it, it was likely a Milk Snake. I told him to look it up on the Internet in the morning and if he didn't want it out before morning he should put a lid on the bucket, because they are good escapists. He said, "that little guy isn't going anywhere."

Next day I get an email telling me the snake got out during the night (imagine that!) and that, after Joe's Internet research, including viewing some video on YouTube, he concluded it was a Corn Snake. I emailed back and told him Corn Snakes are not in this region of the US, but they look a lot like a Milk Snake. He proceeded to conclude that his incredible powers of observation and the reliable YouTube video made him sure the snake was a Corn Snake, and it was probably someone's pet that got away. I tried to convince him to TRUST ME and that the LIKELIHOOD that it was a native snake was much higher than it being a non-native pet snake. He mentioned that maybe because of the changing weather patterns the snake's range had moved this way...

So ok, it got out of hand. And because his poor wife was included in all of these back and forth emails, she, to make the madness end, concluded that the snake was likely a hybrid that Joe discovered named the Cornish Milk Snake. Sure, ok, I can go with that. I think it is just as likely as Joe's pet-snake-released-got-onto-his-porch-via-global-warming theory.

Dead Birds in a Baggie

Today I went to someone's house on the fringes of Elmira and picked up a ziploc baggie with two dead birds in it. All in a day's work. Why would I want a bag of dead birds? Well sometimes people call with interesting birds that have hit their windows and we stuff them and put them in our "forest" in the museum. Kind of morbid, but true. Both of the birds I picked up are rare-ish migratory songbirds, and not very many people have a license to have the birds, even dead. We do. It's called a License to Possess Dead Material (or something like that). I was excited about these two particular birds because people don't see them very often, especially the pretty red one. No, it wasn't a cardinal, it was a Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea). Scarlet Tnaagers are fewer in number these days because they are sensitive to habitat fragmentation and they are also not seen much because they tend to be a secretive forest canopy bird even where they are found commonly. Tanagers are only here in the summer for breeding then they travel back to their wintering grounds which are from Panama to the mid section of South America.

The other bird was an Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea). Also a pretty bird, but brilliant blue of course, not red. They are a little more common than Tanagers and are birds of fields and edges. They also are here only in the summer for breeding, then travel (at night during the late summer and early fall) South to lower Florida and central Mexico southward through the Caribbean and Central America to northern South America.

Thanks to the woman with bad bird luck, these beautiful but unlucky neotropical migrants will be ambassadors for their species in Tanglewood's exhibit hall after they pay a visit to our taxidermist.

Trail Running

I have been meaning to write on here about another way to enjoy nature. Most of the time I write about passive nature enjoyment; looking out the window, birdwatching, going on a leisurely hike. But there is another way to enjoy nature- trail running. I have been running trails sporadically since I started working at Tanglewood 5 1/2 years ago. Trail running is a different way of running. I have run on roads for many years, but trails were a new challenge when I discovered them, and they still are. You can run the same distance on a trail as on the road and feel twice as tired. I wear a heart rate monitor when I run in order to track my time and my calories burned, and I burn 1/3 more calories running a good trail run as I do on the road in the same distance. It's the hills. And probably somewhat just overall uneven terrain making you have to work harder to maintain your balance and of course, it takes longer to run a shorter distance on trails. Uphills are often very challenging and painful and I dread them, downhills are fun, kind of exhilirating in a way because you are trying not to fall off a cliff or just plain down. I love the efficiency of trail running because I often don't have enough time to work out as long as I'd like, so burning more calories in a shorter amount of time is great for me.

Trail running has nature speeding by, which isn't ideal, but it does get me "out there", breathing the forest air and I often run into deer and other wildlife. I don't often run into people and I can talk to myself and get really sweaty and no one looks at me funny. My sons love trail running (probably more than I do). They usually can kick my behind running, but I think that's great. There are other "crazies" like me and my kids and my husband that love to run trails- see you all on Wednesday at 6:30pm behind the West Elmira Fire Dept!