Category: In the Field

Our field trip for Dan Ferandez’s weather and climate class visited the Baltimore harbor by means of the pungy schooner Lady Maryland. Instructors/crew from the Living Classrooms Foundation cast a (educationally-permitted) trawl net, with a little help from us participants.

Then, as the boat tracked to and fro in sight of Fort McHenry, we examined the fauna that we’d brought up in the net. Some fish (not Rockfish, despite my overeager and uninformed ID, but rather Yellow Perch [Perca flavescens] and Spot Croaker [Leiostomus xanthurus]) that favor the brackish water of the estuary, and a couple of comb jellies (not visible in the image, but in the adjacent bucket).

A wee Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus), as well as a full-grown one that had joined the choir eternal. And, of course, plastic rubbish, which at least was serving as substrate for some sea anemones.

For me, one takeaway was a reminder from the educators that partially full bottles of drinking water in a landfill isolate that resource from the hydrologic cycle. If you see a bottle of water that’s otherwise going to be trashed (rather than recycled), the least you can do is empty the bottle so that the water can return to the sea.

Any trip to the Baltimore harbor has to include a shot of the Domino Sugar plant. We see some thin bands of cumulus clouds trying to get themselves better organized. Leta tagged along so that she could loom over the Baltimore city skyline.

My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible. And thus the curse of learning to be a naturalist is further heaped upon my head: it’s not enough that I can’t walk down the street or into the woods without asking myself what kind of trees I’m looking at, without stopping to look at an outcrop of bedrock, without craning to get a better view of what’s flying around. Now I have to gawp at the clouds in the sky.

I grabbed this image of some rumbly-looking cumulus clouds from the heights of the parking deck at West Falls Church metro. I’m still looking for a good shot of cumulonimbus—unlikely now that the summer thunderstorm season has passed.

Chip Clouse and Chuck Bell have the more authoritative rundown of Go Bird! Providence field trips: day two, day four.

Wednesday was pretty much a washout for birding. We did take a quick walk at the education center of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island in between rain showers. (I also visited a Massachusetts Audubon sanctuary on Friday–these independent Audubons in New England have some very impressive facilities.)

Finally, Thursday brought clearing weather and a field trip to Block Island, the intended centerpiece of the conference. The original plan was that we would divide into two groups and bird the island on successive days, without an end-of-day deadline since we had no scheduled dinners Monday through Wednesday. Birding as one large group on Thursday, with a closing dinner scheduled at the end of the day, had conference organizers scrambling. It worked out fairly well, although at times there was a lot of milling about, waiting for a van, and wondering where the trip leaders had gone off to.

Seas were still running about 4-6 feet (my guess) on the morning crossing. Those of us on the top deck were appraised of this fact when we were nailed by a big wave breaking over the starboard bow just as the ferry reached the Point Judith breakwater.

We started near the northern tip of the island, just in sight of the lighthouse. The scrubby woods in this area turned up a few warblers. I saw a yellow-black-and-white Dendroica warbler that otherwise must remain a mystery.

In the afternoon we moved on to Nathan Mott Park, also known as “the enchanted forest.” Birding there was fairly slow, the trail was an out-and-back, and our van was waiting for us at 2:15, so we did not linger. Instead, I looked at this nice Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) in fruit.

The departure and return were sunny and smooth. Most everyone got good looks at Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus) (including side-by-side comparisons to L. marinus) on the beach near the ferry landing. The shearwaters did not make an appearance.

My species count for the Rhode Island part of this trip comes in at about 70. I believe the combined group checklists came in somewhere in the 130’s.

This trip reminded me how much I enjoy birding and just generally hanging out oceanside. I still love the mountains, but the sea pulls me, too. Susan and I visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1993, and that trip got me hooked on birding for good–and hooked on getting whipped by the wind on a rocky beach, scanning the horizon for gannets.

The rain kept to the west side of Narragansett Bay, so our birding around Newport was only dampish. In the parking lot of the Sachuest Point NWR, we watched a young gull trying to get the hang of dropping a mollusc to the pavement in order to smash it open. Our neophyte had figured out the dropping part, but not the targeting: his lunch kept landing softly in the grass.

The loop trail around Sachuest Point is smashing, all the more so in that we got fine looks at rafts of Common Eider (Somateria mollissima), good for my #363. Mike Tucker pointed out the salt-tolerant Rosa rugosa in fruit, not a native but apparently prized locally for its rose hips it produces. Not prized but just as apparent at Sachuest Point is the invasive Asiatic Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). Just down the shore at Third Beach, we turned up the lovely pale yellow “Ipswich” subspecies of Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps).

Back up Third Beach Road is the privately-run Norman Bird Sanctuary, where we stopped for lunch then birded the old fields and woods. The meadows are managed for Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), who returned the favor by perching in the open for good looks. Trip leader Lauren showed us the local geologic specialty, a metaconglomerate known locally as puddingstone.

Our original schedule called for today to be the Block Island trip, but high waves on the Sound and Ocean cancelled ferry service. So Mike Tucker and other ABA trip leaders improvised, and we started the day at the pond and barrier beach of Trustom Pond NWR, a brackish hundred-acre pond that is the only pond in Rhode Island without residential development. The hinterland of the pond includes some wooded areas and fresh water.

Coastal New England geology is actually rather complicated—at least judging from some of the material I’ve skimmed—not at all the simple extended barrier islands of sand that we have at home. The material in many areas is glacial till. Evidence: several relict stone walls skirted by the trails leading to the pond.

The appositely-named Moonstone Beach (formerly a nudist hangout until it became FWS’s responsibility) is managed for Piping Plover (Charadrius melodus) and Least Tern (Sterna antillarum) in breeding season.

We took a break at the huge, beautiful Kettle Pond Visitor Center, the interpretive center for the network of coastal NWRs in the state. By FWS standards, this place is palatial: gift shop, exhibits, a big classroom where we ate lunch.

Good birds but not lifers: Common Loon (Gavia immer), Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), Nashville Warbler (Vermivora ruficapilla), Savannah Sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis). A lifer candidate but not seen well enough to tick (on my list, at least): Common Eider (Somateria mollissima).

After the lunch break, a quick stop at Soccotash Marsh turned up a pair of the Savannahs. Then we found a relatively sheltered spot to scope the very breezy waters off Point Judith to get a distant look at a few eiders. Here’s hoping for a better look later in the week. The working lighthouse at Point Judith is a Coast Guard facility, and hence not open to us tourists. The crashing surf and high winds coaxed a whoop out of me.

Leta and I took a nature stroll along paths in Little Bennett Regional Park, on the southwest side of Little Bennett Creek. On this holiday weekend, the main entrance road was closed to all but campers, so we followed the suggestion at the contact station and parked at the maintenance yard and walked in. A better choice would have been to park in the lot at Wilson Mill along Route 121. This lot is connected to the trail network, despite what the map I received at the contact station said.

Indeed, following that map was a challenge, as it showed trails that weren’t there along with not showing trails that were. And since it’s the area is designed for camping, it’s full of short trails that don’t go in the direction you want. A little bit of climbing, not much; somewhat rocky footing with lots of white quartz cobbles exposed. About 4 miles round trip from the maintenance yard.

Nevertheless, we did make it as far as the Mound Builder Trail to see the earthworks built by Formica exsectoides. We kept an eye on the ground to avoid stirring up the ants that scurried across the trail in sixes and sevens.

Dogwood and spicebush were coming into fruit. We found some interesting mushrooms to confirm some of the IDs I learned in this summer’s class. I heard a Common Raven to go along with the usual mid-day forest bird residents. At a wet spot (relatively so: all the stream beds were dry), Leta spotted Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema sp.) in fruit.

Shiny new exercise equipment has been installed along a trail through Little Paint Branch Park, near the Beltsville Community Center, so new that the orange fence is still in place. The only piece I noticed was the perplexing Tai Chi Wheels; most of the time I was looking (unsuccessfully) for mushrooms along the stream.

Despite this week’s rains, there wasn’t too much exciting to be found as I scrounged the woods of Woodend Sanctuary looking for mushrooms in today’s combo field trip/lecture (a makeup for Monday’s class which was powered out). The understory in the forest here is under strong pressure from deer browse, so most of the greenery below head height is spicebush.

However, I did take the opportunity (since I had a large tote with me) to do a little grounds maintenance. I snagged four raggedy tennis balls, three golf balls, a wine glass, and various other shreds of trash.

We were assembled before 9:00 this morning (and before staff had opened the entrance gate!) at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, situated on the east bank of the Patuxent River in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, for our first field trip in David Farr’s introductory mushrooms (and other macroscopic fungi) class.


As with Don Messersmith’s insect life class, the field trip procedure is simple: go find some specimens, bring them back to the table, and then everybody gets to see everything at once while the instructor leads the ID. David started us off with a particularly fine large (25 cm tall) poisonous Amanita, visible at the lower right corner of the table.


At left, Omphalina chrysophylla is our teaching example of decurrent gills (that is, the lamellae [gills] extend down the stipe [stalk]). The specific epithet means “gold leaf,” and the gills are somewhat that color. Alex found this striking yellow Gyrodon meruloides: you’re looking at the fine network of tubes and pores on the underside of the pileus (cap). Alex didn’t report any Fraxinus in the area where he found this bolete, but the book says that these trees will be around. I had my best luck with easy-to-find wood substrates: on 1-cm sticks I found some nice Schizophyllum commune, easily grown in the lab and hence well-studied.


In my first field and desk test of Miller and Miller’s field guide, I am frustrated that the index doesn’t always include entries for genera, only species—to me, this is like trying to find a name in an Icelandic phone book.

An ANS walk through several sections of Piscataway Park began with this stop at Piscataway Creek. The trip yielded lots of nice dragonflies and butterflies and some good birds: Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) (adult and immature), Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) (patrolling but not catching any fish), quick looks at a Louisiana Waterthrush (Seiurus motocilla), a cooperative pair of Blue Grosbeaks (Giuraca caerulea). Buttonbush proved to be a good spot for finding butterflies. New ones to my very short list: Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus), black-morph Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), Juniper Hairstreak (Callophrys gryneus), Least Skipper (Ancyloxypha numitor).

Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail. This marker is somewhere between miles 28.5 and 29, downstream from Lake Accotink.

I took a short out-and-back nature hike with Bob Pickett and ANS in the watershed of the Furnace Branch of the Monocacy River in Frederick County, just over the Montgomery County line. Destinations on this walk are the remains of Maryland’s extractive industrial past: a mill (perhaps used to mill limestone), a lime kiln, and two sandstone quarries, which provided the stone for the aqueduct that carried the C&O Canal over the Monocacy at its confluence with the Potomac.

Trails are not marked nor maintained: this is a hunting reserve. But, as one of us (Ann) pointed out, hunting pressure on the deer population has allowed the redevelopment of a healthy understory. Setting out on the trail, we soon found a couple of huge Hackberry trees (Celtis occidentalis) and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) fruit beginning to ripen. Numerous Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) and Acadian Flycatchers (Empidonax virescens) were heard, and one flycatcher, irritated at something, came out in the open. Alan found Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) in bloom and a clump of Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora).

After some stream hopping and bushwhacking, we arrived at the quarry sites. An impressive block of quartzite is exposed: sources call it the Sugarloaf Mountain Quartzite (and indeed that mountain is just to the northeast). In a stony patch, Alan spotted an orchid with pretty leaves: Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera pubescens) beginning to shoot up flower stalks. We heard, then after some patient looking, saw a Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivora): not a great look, but good enough for #361.

Well, I had expected this to be the last post for nesting season, as boxes #2 and #6 had hatched out this trip, but Melina reports new eggs in boxes #67 and #68 along lower Barnyard Run—new since our last check before Memorial Day. We have records of nests hatching in July in past years. This might be one of those years, but it’s just as likely the eggs are “excuse-me” drops and will not turn into complete clutches.

On my way to box #2, just north of the boardwalk as you come out into the wetland, I found clumps of Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in bloom. The flowers attracted a small group of Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) who stopped for a nectar snack. The image at right doesn’t do justice to the bold coloring of this butterfly’s upperwings, but it does show the field marks on the under hindwing: silvered spots and the broad cream-colored band.