Around Center Pond

One of my favorite places in Nelson is Center Pond.  I skate on it in the winter, swim in it in the summer and explore around its edges regularly.  Today was a perfect Sunday afternoon, albeit a little cold, for a walk on the ice.  Bailey and I enjoyed walking and observing the stark beauty of nature in winter.   I decided to take advantage of the late afternoon light and use my creative side to photograph the wonders I observe.  Bailey, on the other hand, used his superior sense of smell to explore the land in a very different way.  It was so interesting to see the intensity of his concentration and what he could discover with his nose.   I couldn't capture that with a photograph, but I'll share what I observed instead.

 

I love Ice!

Okay, I don't like driving or slipping on ice, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I love the many forms that ice can take in the winter time.  The bubbles of ice in a stream, the thick, dark ice on a snow-free pond, the skim of ice that is just beginning to form on a puddle or pool.  The patterns of crystals are fascinating and I find myself inclined to lie down in the middle of a frozen pond and just stare into the depths.

This is along one of the streams that comes down off of Murdough Hill.  I love how the ice  rings the  tree.  

So here are some photos of the ice that forms on a small ledge along the Murdough Hill Meander trail.  It is the ice that led to the trail turning away from the wetlands for a short detour up the hill.  Most of the year, this spot is just a ledge with dripping water, not very impressive.  But when the winter is cold enough, this humble spot is transformed into a place of magical beauty.   My photos don't do it justice.   I welcome my neighbors and friends to come and judge for themselves.  

RNTL Property, AKA, Roxbury Nelson Town Line

  So today, Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, is a perfect day to get out into the woods to celebrate a holiday.   I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing.  Al and I decided to meet at our friend, Wendy Byrns', house in Sullivan, find the Nelson town line and follow it down to a place where we had explored before, a place where we had previously come upon a post in the woods with the initials "RNTL".    When we first found this post, we both thought that it was actually a piece of land for rent, ie, "RNTL property,"  until we realized that the post marked the line between Roxbury and Nelson.  Before, we had come on this spot in the course of a hike down and along the shores of Woodward Pond.  It seems like sometimes, we are playing a game of connect the dots, hiking in a new area to connect with an area in which we have explored before.   And today, we definitely covered some new ground.

It was a cold day, so we were "layered up" and had brought extra clothing just in case.  We started our hike before 8 am, after warming cups of tea in Wendy's kitchen.   We headed into the woods right behind Wendy's house, and soon found ourselves on a steep slope, looking down at a stream.  So many times when I am in the woods, I have a pre-conceived notion of the direction which I should travel.  And if I don't think about it and pay attention, I could so easily go far astray.  My instincts were to follow the stream down the hill, but Al pointed out that it was the wrong direction, and that following the stream would lead us away from the town line.  Seeing the sun rising in the southeast, I realized that he was right.  It's as if my internal GPS needed to be re-directed.  Once I became aware, it was much easier to stay on course.

We discovered that this area is full of trails, which we chose to follow for a time, because, as Al puts it, "trails  are there to get us to a point where we can bushwhack."  Bushwhacking and following animal tracks leads us to the good stuff, like porcupine dens, or kill sites, cellar holes and mammoth trees.  Well, we didn't find any kill sites this day, but we did find porcupine tracks, deer (as usual) tracks, snowshoe hare, fox, coyote, probably dog, red squirrel, and yes, bobcat tracks.  We also found some old cabins below Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, one that is particularly large and clearly not in use anymore except by the mice and squirrels. It's a shame really as it is a nice large cabin and looks like it would have accommodated a goodly number of people.

Since I have been out hiking with Al for more than two years, I have gotten used to his habit of quizzing me on the identity of various trees, shrubs and other plants.  And I have gotten pretty good at correctly identifying trees by their bark.  I have to say that I am pretty proud of myself and pleased that I have acquired this skill.  But Wendy hasn't spent as much time as we have, so, while she took the same tree identification course that Al and I did at the Harris Center last winter, she still has to work hard to remember the different features which distinguish the common tree species in our area.  But she is game for being tested and she feels the same satisfaction as I do at identifying trees correctly.  So today was a test, but it's all about the learning, and we spent a great deal of time asking "what kind of tree is this?" and trying to figure out the answers.  In the process, we all learned something and fine-tuned our knowledge of the woods.  Ash, beech, all manner of birchs, sugar, striped and red maples, hemlock, spruce, red oak, service berry, black cherry, hop hornbeam and quaking aspen:  these were the mental work of our hike today.

We also wanted to find the town line and follow it.  We came upon a tree which had been flagged with orange survey tape. Because of our experience a few weeks ago in following the town line between Stoddard and Nelson, I thought that the particular way which the tree was flagged indicated a town boundary.  Rather than hanging the tape from a branch as we often see to indicate a property line, the tape had been wrapped around the trunk of the tree. This, in addition to spray painted trees, was very similar to what we had seen on our previous hike.  Our hunch proved to be accurate, and while we were able to follow the line for quite a way, we didn't make it all the way to the stake which we had found on our previous trip.  But we did find another "RNTL" stake, right at the beginning of a stone wall adjacent to a trail which led down from Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music.

We followed the line a little further in the time we had left before I had to be back for another commitment and along the way, we found another beech tree with many claw marks.  We also found the first bobcat tracks of the day, which is always very satisfying to me, since it has taken me a long time to easily recognize bobcat tracks.

Speaking of time, we checked the time and found that I only had about 15 minutes to get back to Wendy's house, so it was a speedy trudge out of the wood on that path up to Apple Hill Center that we had crossed earlier.  It was a lot steeper than we expected and we couldn't move fast, but eventually, we made it.  Wendy paused to sit on the swing below the buildings at Apple Hill.

Usually once we get to a road, we are pretty much finished with new sights and sounds, but not today.  Today, we followed, though not too closely a skunk as it ambled down the road.  I don't usually expect to see a skunk this time of year, so it may not have been healthy.  It was especially telling that it was out in the middle of the day and that it continued to go down the road.  In fact, after I left to run my errand, the skunk moved around Wendy's house, and when I returned, I saw it wandering down the road again.

Just the same, it was an interesting sighting for the end of our hike.  And how we enjoyed the delicious end to our hike, which was a Wendy-made gypsy soup, with lots of tasty, crisp vegetables.  The food, the companionship, the discoveries: all add up to a full and satisfying day.  Well worth braving the bracing cold morning.

a fungus growing over  survey tape on a fallen tree

Black cherry pits pile at the cabin, courtesy of the mice.

Interior of the abandoned cabin below Apple Hill

Exterior of the abandoned cabin.   Too bad it's abandoned--it has a lot of potential.

Whew, we made it to the top of the hill and now we can swing!

We gave this skunk a wide berth.  The skunk is the dark spot at the upper left  side of the road.

Bobcat State of Mind, Part 2--the pictures

Some of these photos might be a little gruesome, but nature isn't all nice sunsets and flowers.  Nature is life and death, and the more time we spend in the woods, the more we come to appreciate the struggles that each animal faces just to find food and survive. The bobcat we tracked spent a lot of time weaving through the woods, looking for prey or a place to bed down.  We also found many places where either the deer or squirrels dug under the snow to find food.

Bobcat Track, looks like a double register, that is, the bobcat stepped in its own track. 

Squirrel leg bones from foot to hip

Gray squirrel skull with a great deal of flesh still on it, indicating a  fresh kill. Note the  red incisors.

What is that bright orb burning through the mist?

Gray squirrel from above.  

Here is how we found the kill site.  We believe that a red fox got this squirrel.

Deer hair.  Pile number one

Deer hair, pile number three.

More deer hair, pile number two or three.  

Al in the Lead Mine between Hardy Hill  Road and the Nelson Road.

The exit from the Lead Mine toward the Nelson Road.  

A Bobcat state of mind

I met Al at his house at 8 am, and it seemed like we would be hiking in the fog under another overcast sky.  We have been enjoying the January thaw with warm temperatures, but fog and rain have been the typical weather during this thaw and we had no reason to expect more on this Monday morning.  Less than ideal weather has never kept us from hiking.  So, we considered our layers for the day, donned our gators to deal with wet snow and headed out the door.

We hiked into the woods across the street from Al's house, with the initial goal to find the trails which Terry Mednick maintains near his cabin.  It didn't take long to find the trail, but along the way, we found tracks of the animal that would dominate our hike for the day: deer, deer and more deer.   But where there are deer tracks, there are usually tracks of other less common animals as well.  As we followed Terry's trail, skirting around Hardy Hill, or Mount Monednick, as Terry has humbly dubbed the area around his cabin, we scanned the ground for other tracks and animal sign.  We were not disappointed to come on bobcat scat early in our day.  That was all we needed to leave the trail and take off into the woods to follow the bobcat tracks.  The wet snow made tracking fairly easy, except where the snow had melted away.  We can't complain, though.  Last year, we had so few good tracking days, with little or no snow on most of our hikes.

We followed the bobcat tracks until we couldn't follow them anymore, and found ourselves on a steep slope south of Hardy Hill.  At the base of the hill, we came upon a stream which undoubtedly flowed into Silver Lake.  Streams are good features to follow as all animals need water and some animals, such as mink, favor small streams and brooks where they feed on crayfish and other aquatic prey.  Al followed the stream on the left bank and I on the right, as we continued to scan the ground for interesting tracks.   I stopped occasionally to look up as well, since last week, we found so many bear nests and bear-clawed trees, which one does not notice unless one looks up.

Al came upon the bobcat tracks again, at least, we assumed that it was the same bobcat, and we followed the tracks as they wove through the woods, over deer tracks, intersecting with red squirrel, or gray squirrel.   We were blessed to have clear tracks to follow--definitely bobcat, with the characteristic "C" shaped pad.  Canine tracks have a raised area that looks like an "X", so it is easy, when the snow is the right consistency, to differentiate between the two.  It is helpful to have two sets of eyes when tracking, because when a track becomes faint or seems to disappear, one set of eyes can catch a clue that the other person misses.  At one point, the bobcat had walked along a stone wall which was snow free and we had to trust that we would find clues to know where the bobcat went next.  We were not disappointed; we found a foot print here, another further on and soon, the bobcat left the stone wall and we could follow the tracks through the snow again.

Somehow, we always come to a point where the tracks fade and we have to stop.  It's disappointing, but we  don't stay discouraged for long. The woods offer up more tracks to follow and we are off again.  This time, it's canine tracks following the deer run.  Small canine, probably red fox.  Actually, we were soon rewarded for following these new tracks.  We came upon a kill site, where the fox had fed on a gray squirrel.  We found the skull of the squirrel, with dark gray fur in a rough circle on the ground as well as leg bones.  The site was not old, as the skull and bones still had a lot of flesh on them.  We left the leg bones, but took the skull with us.  I have put it outside inside a have-a heart trap (to keep it from scavengers) to decay, with the hope that we will have a nice clean squirrel skull to add to our growing collections.

As macabre as it may sound, kill sites are always exciting finds,because we get a glimpse into the lives (and deaths) of these forest animals that we actually see so rarely.  We have often remarked that the animals probably see us more than we see them.  They are long gone, for the most part, when we come upon their tracks, having smelled us or spotted us through the trees.Once  in a great while, we will see a moose, or deer, a bobcat, fox, or coyote, or even bear.  The sight of a fisher, or another of the mustelid family, is so rare, that following tracks and finding kill sites bring a stronger sense of the reality of the creatures.

After finding the remains of the gray squirrel, we moseyed in the purest sense of the word back in the direction of Al's house.  Moseying really means moving slowly, observing the tracks we found, which included more bobcat, old fisher tracks, deer, deer and more deer tracks, snowshoe hare, and taking time to enjoy the beautiful sunshine that had broken through the clouds and made the day warm indeed.  We took a break to snack on some clementines, cheese, a baked potato, and some trail mix and stretch our tired muscles.  At least, my muscles were tired.  The amazing thing was that we were just a few feet from the "Old Road to Dublin" trail, but the slope hid the trail from us.

Soon enough we found ourselves across from Wendy Klemperer's house, looking down on one of the large vernal pools in town, a place I have studied for many years, observing fairy shrimp, wood frogs, and spotted salamanders.  Last year, this pool had dried up early and probably any amphibian eggs had not survived beyond the larval stage.  We hope for more snow this year, so that this vernal pool might prove to be a suitable habitat for the frogs and salamanders to mature.

Our last goal for the day's hike was to find a lead mine which Jonathan Smith had told Al about.  The mine was supposed to be located somewhere in the land between Hardy Hill Road and the Nelson Road.   Parts of this area were steeply sloped with large boulders and exposed ledge.  Based on our experience with the Lead Mine off of Old Stoddard Road, we thought that this would be the right place to look for the mine.  Along the way, we found more bobcat tracks, fairly fresh, so, of course, we followed them!  The tracks seemed to be following the deer tracks fairly closely.  In fact, at one point, I looked over at a spot in the woods and saw a large pile of fur.  Another kill site? Well, there was no blood or flesh, but a lot of hair, which we thought at first was squirrel again, but the individual hairs kinked which indicated deer.  Following the bobcat tracks further, we found another pile of fur, and another, the final pile clearly deer fur, red, white, brown, and black and long, with hair folicles still attached.  No blood or flesh though. We decided that the fur might in fact have been there for a while, but we still hoped to find  a carcass.

No carcass, and we lost the bobcat tracks, so after Al found the lead mine and we explored it a bit, we headed with less moseying back to Al's house for hot chocolate, more clementines and a review of a very successful day in the woods, exploring and appreciating more of the land right in Al's own neighborhood.

From Greengate to the Overlook: Bobcat, Bears, Porcupine and Clementines

It was a clear and cool day this past Monday.   Not too warm.  Not too cold: just right for hiking in a foot of snow.  Our goal for this beautiful day was to reach the "Overlook," a spot between Kulish Ledges and October Snow, on the southwest slope of Osgood Hill. Always in search of alternate routes to our favorite places, we parked at Gwenyth Tolman's house and skirted the slope below Kulish Ledges and above Spoonwood Pond, to approach the Overlook from below.

Early on in our trek, we came upon tracks of another human on snowshoes, with a dog apparently dragging a stick.  We also crossed numerous deer trails, but hoped, as always to find something a little more interesting than deer.   For a while, we followed a stream to see if we might come upon mink tracks, since these water-loving muskelids tend to stick close to brooks and small streams to find crayfish and other small water-dwelling prey.   No such luck today, however.   We steered east away from the stream toward our intended destination.

Following the contour of the slope, we crossed tracks of fox, snowshoe hare and grouse.  And deer, more deer.  Often, because the tracks were old, it was hard to tell what animal had passed this way, but we could be certain that it wasn't a deer if the tracks went under obstacles that a deer couldn't possibly fit.  It is never enough to look at just a small sample of tracks to identify the animal.  One needs to follow, to observe the patterns and where the animal went, before coming to conclusions about what it was.   Of course, sometimes the signs are unmistakable -scat, hair, or scent posts which indicate one species over another.
Usually, though, one has to follow the trail a bit before these unmistakable signs appear.

Finally, after a long slog up a very steep slope, where we pulled ourselves up by saplings and on hands and knees, we came to a point which we believed was just below the overlook.  But we had to be sure, so Al took a piece of a clementine peel and attached it to a small branch which he thought we would be able to see from the overlook, if our guess was right.

Scrambling up directly under the overlook was out of the question--just way too steep, at least for me, so I took a path to the left, following the track of a porcupine at times, then bobcat, then grouse, until I worked my way up and above the overlook.  Al took a slightly steeper track and checked out a spot where he believed that the bobcat had sat under an overhanging boulder.  Eventually, we both reached the overlook which affords a spectacular view of Spoonwood, White Swamp, Holt Hill, Nubanusit, and Crotched Mountain, and, if we looked really carefully, a little clementine peel on a small branch in the valley below.  I actually needed my binoculars to see it, but it was there!

So we had reached the overlook from below.  Now what?  Well, if you were at the top of a steep slope, and the snow was soft and giving, what would you do?  Well, okay, maybe you wouldn't do what we did, which was to find a route to slide down the hill on our rear-ends.  I will admit that it was a little tricky and I didn't always follow Al's route, because he had stripped off all the soft snow and left me with a pretty slick slide, but it was fun and exhilarating and no one broke anything and it was a lot easier than going up. We took the time on the way down to peer into caves in the boulder field and note the porcupine and bobcat tracks, and the amazing way these animals maneuver these slopes with apparent ease, and observe the stripped bark of saplings, work of the intrepid porcupines.

Following the contour of the slope, we found ourselves in an area above Spoonwood Pond, where we had been before--last summer when we were trying to follow the stream to White Swamp, the wrong stream, as it didn't lead to White Swamp.  At the stream, we found more grouse tracks, and moose tracks.  We moved through an area of the forest, where there were beech trees, and where there are beeches, we always look for bear sign.  We weren't disappointed: bear nests, bear claw marks, some older, some new.  Our route seemed to take us through an area full of bear nests. I felt afterwards that we were following the bear's trail, from one beech tree to another, until we actually lost count of the number of bear nests that we found. The bear nests are branches twisted over one another, brown beech leaves still hanging off the branches.  The bears grab the branches to get at the beech nuts.  I can imagine them sitting up at the top of the trees, gorging  themselves in preparation for the long winter months.

The long winter months: our favorite time of year for following the tracks of so many forest creatures.  We finished our hike where we had started, and noted fresh human and dog tracks.  Gwenyth and Bronwen were taking a walk, with faithful Bronte, their chocolate lab.   We stopped on the way out to thank them for letting us park in their driveway.   Our exploration had been challenging, exhilarating, and rewarding.  What more could we want?

Hot Cocoa, of course, and more clementines, please.    

Well clawed bear beech, with an old "bear nest"

The Overlook with White Swamp in foreground and parts of Nubanusit further out.  

Al ponders the route down.  Somewhere over his shoulder is that little piece of clementine peel.

We slid down the slope on the left side of this photo. 

Al thought this boulder looked like an owl, but I thought it looked like a  moose  head in profile.  Al added the  snowballs for eyes.

Bear Nests from this past fall.  

The roots of this yellow birch were totally bare from the top of the  boulder to the ground, a distance of about  6 feet, but the tree looked pretty healthy.  

New Year's Eve Hiking on Kendall Lane

After getting side-tracked by fisher tracks last week in our quest to explore the northwest corner of Nelson, we returned this last day of 2012 to try again.  We were joined by Wendy Byrn and a new hiking friend, Lucy Ryder, whom Al met at the pancake breakfast on Saturday.  Lucy and her husband just bought a house on Granite Lake and she was eager to get to know more of our little hill town.

We parked at the end of Kendall Lane in Sullivan again, but did not allow ourselves to be swayed by tracks before we even started down this class VI road.  Recent snowfall necessitated the use of snowshoes, at least for Wendy, Lucy and me.  Al has some big boots that work well if the snow isn't too deep. It's hard work getting used to moving in the snow after more than a year of no snow, so we were working up a sweat and using some muscles that haven't been used in a while.

At first the tracks we saw were old, probably from the day before, but filled in from the windy night we had on Sunday evening, but soon we saw fresher tracks--deer, lots of deer tracks.  Then the reward for our labors: we discovered bobcat tracks!  Backtracking the bobcat, we found where the bobcat had rolled and urinated in the snow.  We also found snowshoe hare tracks that had crossed the bobcat tracks.

Further down the hill, we repeatedly crossed fresh deer and bobcat tracks.  It would be nice to be able to observe all the movement that the tracks indicate.  If we could have a vantage point to sit quietly and watch, the winter landscape would come alive.

Our intended destination was Otter Brook and Ellis Reservoir, but we had reached a dead end--Kendall Lane seemed to peter out and end in a wet area, but no sign of either Otter Brook or Ellis Reservoir.  We began to think that a second week would go by without reaching our goal.  Lucy had to get back to her family and Wendy decided that she would go with her.  Al and I determined to go forward, in spite of Lucy's concerns that we would get lost or not get back before dark.  Wendy was confident that we would be fine, but Lucy had never hiked with us before.  She was not used to our comfort level in the woods, even when we don't know exactly where we are and where we're going.

But we showed her what we planned to do and how we would get back to my house and promised to let her know when we got back so she wouldn't worried.  Before we parted ways, however, we looked at a spot which Al had found, where we hypothesized an owl had touched down to catch an animal under the snow and taken flight again.  We could see the where the wings had brushed the snow.

The open area where we parted ways was like a bowl, with a ring of trees around it.  The conifers grew together in a thick grove and every bough was weighed down with snow, but there was nothing for it.  We had to go through them to get out of the bowl.  Checking our compass, we took a southerly track.  We crossed the bobcat tracks again and again.  That cat certainly roamed back and forth through this area.

When Al took one route and I another, we soon lost sight of each other.  We used our owl calls to keep track of each other and stay close enough together.   Finally, we made our way out of the thick spruce grove and into more mature mixed hardwood and conifers.  Al cleared a spot on a rock and took a seat to wait for me.  I thought it was about time for a break, but that isn't why Al had stopped.  Without a word, he facilitated the opportunity for me to discover another point of interest: a deer bed, with what looked like orange urine.  Orange!  Threw me off--certainly not the typical color of urine.  Al surmised that it could be musk and sure enough, one smell and his supposition was confirmed.   Another piece of knowledge that I didn't have before: deer musk is orange!

I still needed to take a break, but we could hear running water at last.  We had found Otter Brook.  In fact, we found ourselves at a spot on the brook where we had been two years before, near where we saw a moose on another snowy day.  We crossed the brook at an old mill site, scrambling over snowy, ice-covered boulders.    It was a little hairy at times, but we made it safely across.  Time at last for a break.  We made a little fire, and ate our snacks.  We warmed our hands and watched our damp clothing steam.   Amazing what a little fire can do--just enough to give us the warmth we needed to move forward.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we found coyote tracks on the boulders on the stream as well as more bobcat and deer tracks. Our final trudge was through an area east of Old Towne Road that had been logged two years before.  In fact, we met the skidder in this same area on the day that we saw the moose.  Now the area was beginning to fill in with the early succession shrubs and trees.  Al commented that this would be a good area for blackberry picking in the summer.

Finally, we reached Old Towne Road and met Al and Ellen Guida, the owners of the land over which we had just crossed.  We had a nice chat with them then walked back to my house for our usual after hike cup of mint hot cocoa.   Safely back, all in one piece after another satisfying lovely day.