I have mentioned before that we have muscadine vines all over the mountain. They grow up in the tops of the pines, and they grow on the ground. They are also growing on a small oak tree just beside our driveway, where we put cat cages to acclimate our cats to their new home when we moved back in 2016.
They are small. Very small. Here is my hand to give some scale. My hands are appropriately sized for my height.
Muscadines provide food for birds and, I assume, squirrels, of which we have quite a few. I don’t know whether these will survive to maturity, and, if they do, how many might be available for us to eat. I doubt that all in the bunch will survive. I have never seen that many grapes in a bunch on any of the vines around here.
Muscadines are sweet, but the skins are thick and tough, and the seeds are large compared to the meat of the grape. All that makes it hard to eat a muscadine, especially wild muscadines. Apparently some varieties are grown commercially, but they are seldom at any of the grocery stores where we shop.
I’m not sure whether these will be the deep red, almost black grapes known as muscadines, or the green or bronze variety called scuppernongs. We’ll see around August or September, when they are supposed to be ripe.
We have been seeing some small birds flying around our front steps for a while, and then we saw them flying up under the porch. They are building a nest on an electrical box from which a light hangs. It seems like a great spot, sheltered from the weather and well up off the ground. Unfortunately, two or three cats frequent that area, and one of them is a killer.
This is Chloe watching the bird perched on the bottom post of the stairs. Chloe is very interested. When the bird flew to the other side of the steps, Chloe’s head followed.
Chloe is not the real threat to the adult birds. That would be Sylvester. He is a natural born killer.
I had intended to check the nest, and tear it down if there were no eggs or baby birds, but I’m afraid I’ve waited too long. We know what is going to happen. If the adults escape Sylvester’s bloody mouth, the baby birds will fall prey to him, or Chloe or Dusty. Chloe and Dusty are not the killers that Sylvester is, but I don’t know a cat that can resist killing a baby bird on the ground. The killer might even end up being Mollie, since she goes out for a while every day. She has already brought one bird in, apparently to play with it. It was still alive. We opened a window and it flew out.
This is apparently a pair of white-breasted nuthatches. They are fairly common throughout almost the entire United States.
We have been losing dogwoods for several years. I remember seeing the side of a nearby hill on my way home from Huntsville in early spring a few years ago. It seemed like hundreds of dogwoods were blooming on the bare slopes. Around here, just a few miles away, I have been cutting and burning dead dogwoods for some time. I keep an eye on the remaining trees as I walk the dogs and note which seem be dead. This spring we have been pleasantly surprised to see quite a few dogwoods blooming.
When I look out the window where I’m sitting right now, I can see four, or possibly five trees in bloom. I may be misremembering, but it seems that in past years dogwoods bloomed before most of the surrounding trees began to leaf out. This year it seems to be happening simultaneously, which makes it harder to see the flowering trees.
I’m not positive of the cause of the dogwood deaths. We have had a couple of recent summers that were very hot and very dry. There is also a dogwood blight, dogwood anthracnose, that has wrought havoc on dogwoods from the northeast to the southeast, and on the west coast as well. Some forests in the northeast have had essentially all dogwoods infected, and infection of forest dogwoods almost always results in the death of the tree. There are some effects on the trees that are diagnostic. In reading about the blight I have found that some things I have noticed on trees that seem to be having problems are actually characteristic of infected trees. So it seems that the dogwood blight is infecting trees here on our mountain.
In the south, the trees that are most at risk are those at high elevations, those in moist conditions, and those that are in shaded forest areas. Our elevation is not as high as the sources I read worry about. Moisture has not been much of a problem here, either. Of course, most of the trees, except those that have been planted, are in the forest. Another condition that makes dogwoods more susceptible is drought and the resulting stress. I hope we don’t see that this summer.
Several sources indicated that climate change might be partially responsible for the increase in damage caused by dogwood anthracnose, and those sources were from more than 20 years ago.
We are also apparently in another kind of blight, one caused by pine beetles. I have written before about how many dead trees we have on our little five-acre tract. It’s getting worse here, and very noticeable along our dog walks.
Some of these trees that look alive are not. The three pines in the center of the image have lighter trucks because the bark has fallen off. What you can’t see in this image is the large number of trees that have fallen around these still-standing trees.
Pine beetle infestations apparently come in waves several years apart. There are several species of beetle that kill pines, and they can infect healthy trees, but trees that have been subjected to drought or other stresses are more susceptible. So, score another for our recent droughts.
I haven’t looked carefully at our dead pines to see whether there are signs of beetle infestations. However, I have noticed that it’s not just pines that are dying. I see a fair number of hardwoods that have died, as well. Probably not as many as the pines, but still, more than I would expect to result from simply aging. So I wonder whether we are seeing some effects on our forests from climate change.
And now from the large to the small. Here are some thyme-leaved bluets (Houstonia serpyllifolia).
I spied these beside the road on one of my dog walks.
Leah and i were on our way into town for dinner on Thursday when we saw a turtle crossing Technology Parkway, a four-lane, divided road. As we approached we realized it was huge. I thought it was a snapping turtle. We turned around and went back to make sure it crossed safely. When we got out of the car and approached it, we realized it was not a snapping turtle. But it was still huge, the largest turtle I have seen that was not a snapper.
Here it is with Leah’s foot for scale.
It was northbound in the east-bound lanes, so it had the rest of those lanes, the grassy median, and the west-bound lanes to cross. Traffic was very light, but we were afraid it might be hit, so I picked it up and carried it to the far side of the road. I found a wet place near a boggy creek to put it down, and after posing with Leah’s foot, it scooted off.
The turtle was close to a foot across and weighed at least 10 pounds. I held it just aft of the center of its shell, just within reach of the claws on its hind legs. When I picked it up it immediately started making swimming motions. The back claws just barely scratched my hands. I held it out away from my body because I expected what came next — urine. As a non-physician, I would say that it was a healthy, clear stream that missed my clothes but might have dripped on my shoe.
Just before we picked it up a pickup truck came from the west and stopped. The couple inside said the turtle looked like the one they had moved a few days ago, on that day traveling in the opposite direction.
I did some online research and decided it was a river cooter (Pseudemys concinna), which I had never heard of. A distinguishing feature is a C shape on the second scute. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that when I had it in my hands, and it can’t be seen in the photo. The shell was wet and a little muddy.
Based on the Web site information, the other turtle that can be confused with the river cooter is the Florida cooter, but the Florida cooter’s range covers south Georgia, not north Georgia. So river cooter seems to be a good guess.
From the Wikipedia page on river cooter: “The name “cooter” may have come from an African word “kuta” which means “turtle” in the Bambara and Malinké languages, brought to America by African slaves.”
Friday morning I took the dogs for their regular walk down Fouche Gap Road. As usual, I was woolgathering while the dogs sniffed out anything new along the road. We were about halfway down the mountain, just passing a low tree that was completely covered by a mound of kudzu and muscadine vines. Just as I drew up even with it, there was a loud rustling and crashing from it.
The mind works quickly in situations like that. I fully expected a large animal to come out right at me. I thought, what will it be? I went through the possibilities. There are some bears around; I have never seen or heard of one in our area, but the Atlanta news sometimes shows videos of bears in suburban neighborhoods. I have seen coyotes here, but they run away when they see a human. In south Georgia they have wild boars that can do a lot of damage to a person, but I have never heard of one in north Georgia.
So, I wondered, what will it be? Will it attack me? Will the dogs bark? Will they throw themselves at the wild animal that is almost certainly going to be huge and, from the sound of its thrashing, angry?
And then, in the last part of that instant when all those thoughts ran through my mind, a turkey burst out of the vines and flew away.
It happened so fast I really didn’t have a chance to be scared. Startled, definitely. A profane expression might have escaped my mouth at that point.
The dogs must have known it wasn’t going to be dangerous because all they did during the moments leading up to the turkey explosion was stare in the direction of the noise with somewhat greater than mild interest.
Turkeys are noisy flyers. We saw another one on our way back up the mountain. I heard its wings hit limbs as it flew through the tree tops. I wish they would make a little more noise on the ground instead of hiding until the last moment.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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