This year’s event, for me, was the best ever, largely due to Liz’s being able to attend after an eleventh hour cancellation by a group at her work. She and I wound up spending a couple of days after the festival birding, photographing, relaxing, adventuring, and just generally having a ball.

Topping the list of great moments was the audience I was granted with a Swainson’s Warbler the Monday after the festival concluded. I went out prospecting for this famously hard-to-see species on a dreary morning with intermittent rain. Along a secondary road near Babcock State Park I found a patch of rhododendron where at least two Swainson’s were singing strongly. One of those was uncooperative, but the second provided me with one of the more thrilling avian encounters I’ve ever had.

In most of its breeding range, Swainson’s Warbler is a bird of wet woods, canebrakes, swamps, and river bottoms. But in the southern Appalachians, there is a population of Swainson’s that is closely tied to rhododendron thickets. Rhododendrons, for most, conjure up images of horticultural beauty and gentility, as their flowers are familiar garden centerpieces.

This, I believe (and by all means, please correct my botany if it’s wrong, as it frequently is), is Rhododendron catawbiense an early-blooming relative of Rhododendron maximum, the West Virginia state flower. R. maximum cloaks the rocky banks of creeks with a dense blanket of dark green.

It’s pretty, certainly, but it is also thick.

So thick in fact, that it has a gloomy, almost foreboding aspect at times. I’m sure one would quickly learn to dread rhododendrons, were one to have to traverse or clear any significant amount of them.

No wonder Swainson’s Warblers and humans rarely meet.

Though my meeting with this bird lasted only a few minutes, time seemed to slow and stretch. I’ve seen the species a generous handful of times, but I have never seen it so well. I was struck by its subtle color and the way its railroad spike of a bill blended with its flat crown to give it an anvil-headed look. I marveled at its long pink toes, its big black eyes, and of course, by its ringing, rolling, liquid voice.

That voice, and this bird, are in many ways, a personification (birdification?) of the rhododendrons. Superbly adapted to the niche these shrubs provide, the warbler is as at home here as a clownfish in a coral reef, a giraffe in an acacia thicket, or a flea on the back of a dog. The key, apparently, is a tangled understory but a relatively open forest floor, where these warblers spend most of their time foraging with a unique, shuffling gate.

Once the breeding season is over, Swainson’s Warblers take up residence in similarly dense understory in forests of the West Indies and nearby portions of the Yucatán and Honduras. They especially favor the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, a suitably exotic winter residence. But everywhere, throughout their lives, Swainson’s are birds that earn the designation, “seldom seen.” Our time with them is measured in seconds, not in hours.

The bird soon returned to his tangled lair and I to my less claustrophobic habitat. I noticed that I was out of breath–I don’t think I’d inhaled or exhaled very often while the bird was around–and trembling just a little with the excitement of seeing a very special ghost. I’ll always be grateful for the chance to have gotten to know this mysterious and wonderful creature just a little bit better.

While I certainly intend to keep putting up blog posts when I have something that fits better here than elsewhere, if you’re interested in keeping up with what I’m doing, for now, Facebook is where I am. There’s a badge at the upper left of the page that you can click to find my personal Facebook profile and send me a friend request.

There’s also a badge where you can become a fan of Peterson Field Guides and I would appreciate it very much if you would do that. At the moment, the PFG fan page is, well, it’s me. But only in that I’m responsible for posting content there and serving as moderator. Like all things social media, it is meant to encourage interaction. And in only a week and a half, we’re already seeing a great response, with fans sharing their own photos and experiences.

Of course, I’m honored that the people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have asked me to take on the PFG fan page. It’s an opportunity to share a lot of great content from the Peterson vaults, create my own, and to have other interested naturalists share theirs. I’m especially pleased that we’ll be covering the vast range subjects of natural history that are featured in Peterson guides, though you can expect that birds will feature most prominently. I know it will be a big opportunity for me to learn, which is wonderful.

As an example of the kind of things I’ve been doing on the PFG page, below is a video I made and posted last week. It’s just a quick sequence of calling Spring Peepers, but I think it’s nice, especially if you haven’t been out and actually watched this classic sound being produced.

You can also click here to go to the HD version of the video on Facebook itself. It’s much better looking in HD, to say the least.

So, that’s where I am these days. I don’t know if six months from now Facebook will be over and we’ll all have moved on, but at the moment–most of the time–it feels like the place to be.

But please, keep this blog on your RSS subscriptions…or check back every once in a while, if you don’t do RSS. You never know when I’ll have something that only fits here. Thanks for stopping by!

On Saturday, July 26th, I attended a half-day photography workshop hosted by Wil & Donna Hershberger, a couple of dedicated wildlife photographers and sound recordists who live in eastern West Virginia. The workshop was held at Lilypons, a unique nursery for aquatic plants just northwest of Washington, DC. I went expecting to concentrate on water lilies, but ended up being captivated by lotuses. It’s easy to see why this huge flower is a favorite object of contemplation–its easy to lose oneself in it hues and its geometry.

Shortly after sunup, we fanned out along the dikes containing the lotus ponds. What follows is a sampling of lotuses in various stages of their bloom cycle from bud to seed. If you’re having a distracted, harried sort of day, just turn on some nice soothing music, feel your breath, relax your muscles (but not so much that you can’t use the scroll wheel) and join me for a little trip through lotus life. You can click on any image for a larger view.

Cool plant, huh? Thanks for stopping by!