North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  It promised to be a warm and sunny day. Here Trillium, Clintonia, Bunchberry, and False Lily of the Valley had mostly finished flowering, though Orange and Yellow Hawkweed still bloomed. Southern Ontario had followed the deficient timber management practices I’d learned about in Michigan, and I could see its results here. This rocky, scrubby forest was very much a product of the late-twentieth-century timber overharvest, with young stands of Paper Birch (its abundance an indicator of fire as well as logging), White Pine, Red Pine, Jack Pine, Red Maple, aspen, and Red Oak, as well as small stands of fir, spruce, and Northern White-Cedar. The pretty blackwater river had a number of rocky chutes and rapids, although these are not the source of the park’s name. Instead it was named after an old timber-era log chute that remained here as late as 1960—testament to the long run of logging along this watershed. Each spring, logs were sent down the wooden chutes to the mill in Massey. A Hermit Thrush sang from a thicket at 9 a.m., with the sun high, and Ovenbirds and Scarlet Tanagers sang from the woods. I saw evidence of a lot of recent timber cutting by a local beaver family.

  Before midday, I was back on the road, headed about three hours farther east to Algonquin Provincial Park. I passed through the large communities of Sudbury and North Bay and turned south at Eau Claire onto a bucolic back road ending at Kiosk Lake, the park’s northwestern entrance. A Broad-winged Hawk soared over the road as I passed through Nippising First Nations territory, marked by a large signboard. The Kiosk Road led south through a mix of landscapes, boreal spruce forest and north-country farms following the valley of the Amable du Fond River. History here, too, is all about logging—a recurrent theme in these parts.

  I camped on Kioshkokwi Lake (Kiosk for short), a very minor corner of famed Algonquin Provincial Park, and I planned to spend only a night here. My time on the road was coming to an end, and I was headed rapidly east and south to my final destination, northern New York State. Exploring by bike, I found the usual cast of north-country characters: Common Raven, Blue Jay, Belted Kingfisher, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Eastern Kingbird, Ruffed Grouse, Red-eyed Vireo, and American Redstart.

  The next morning I awoke to the sound of rain on my tent fly. A nasty weather system had come in overnight, and even at 9 a.m., I was still in the tent, waiting for the rain to break. When I emerged, I found the low cloud and steady light drizzle typical of the north country. Today was July 1—Canada Day. The weather wasn’t promising for the annual celebration, which I planned to observe at the Black Bear campground in Petawawa, Ontario. Yet in spite of the rain, a male Magnolia Warbler sang from a branch just overheard.

  I continued east through three hours of gloom and rain on the two-lane blacktop that was the Trans-Canada Highway. Petawawa sits on the south bank of the mighty Ottawa River, and Black Bear campground is down in a patch of woods on the shore of the river, which at first I took for a large lake—it is that broad. The campground was filled with Canadian families here to celebrate their nation’s birthday.

  This was a far cry from wilderness, but it was the best I could find. Naturizing yielded an Ox-eyed Daisy as well as a Beaked Hazel, a shrub I had seen in several spots in Minnesota. False Solomon’s Seal was producing green berries, and Spreading Dogbane was flowering. Birdwise, I found a Pine Warbler and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, but not much else. I went to bed early, listening to earth-shattering fireworks shooting out over the river after 10 p.m. on this, my last night in Canada.

  LEAVING THE NESTING GROUNDS FOR THE COAST

  Many wood warblers nesting in Ontario finish breeding by midsummer. After raising their fledged young, the adults and the first-year birds separate, and both take a late-summer vacation before heading toward the Tropics. During this loafing period, the birds molt their feathers and start to fatten up for their long autumn travels. The adults generally depart before the young born that year. Of course, the adults already have experienced southbound migration and have first-hand knowledge of their route.

  After departure, many of the birds that nest in the boreal forests of central Canada head eastward to the Atlantic coast rather than due south. They follow much the same route that I was traveling as I headed toward the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Their annual travel describes a loop—in spring, they head north up the Mississippi to Ontario; after breeding, they move east to the coast and then south to the Tropics. When they reach the East Coast part of the trip, many species spend time putting on fat before heading southward in earnest. This is a little-known period in the lives of these birds. They remain silent. They wear their drab autumn plumage. They stay hidden among the changing leaves.

  NINE

  Adirondack Spring

  Early July 2015

  Bobolink

  Now, except for the stragglers, all the birds were back that were coming back. Barn Swallows, home from Brazil, skimmed over the northern pastures. Yellow Warblers, home from the Yucatán, darted along the roadside. Bobolinks, home from Argentina, sang on the fences. The great spring migration was over.

  —EDWIN WAY TEALE, North with the Spring

  At 6 a.m., an American Robin sings and a Pileated Woodpecker drums in the sharp postdawn cold. I depart overcrowded Black Bear Campground, traveling southeastward toward Ottawa. I am surprised to see a Brown Thrasher—a bird of the South—fly across the road, and then a Green Heron. Barn Swallows twist and turn over an large old field, where male Bobolinks hover improbably above the tall grass. I cross a small river, labeled “Mississippi,” west of Ottawa. Both river and road cut through handsome, thick beds of pale-gray limestone before passing right through Ottawa’s crowded western suburbs. I struggle to find Route 416 toward the New York border at Ogdensburg. A couple of days earlier, I’d been on the wild northern shore of Lake Huron, but now I am in flat farming country and the suburbs of Canada’s national capital. I am in a hurry to get back to wilderness—the interior of the Adirondack Mountains.

  On my reentry to the United States, I took a high bridge across the broad and deep blue Saint Lawrence River. I told the welcoming U.S. border control officer that I was an ornithologist on a field trip, and he pointed up to a pair of Ospreys nesting on a platform. From Ogdensburg, I navigated a maze of back roads toward the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, the largest tract of wild lands in the eastern United States. I’d spent twelve summers at camp in these mountains in the 1960s and ’70s, and this was my long-overdue homecoming.

  There were more welcoming sights and sounds along the two-hour back-roads drive through upstate New York. I saw the Eastern Bluebirds common in the Saint Lawrence Valley. Northwest of the park, the land is rural and open and agricultural, with only the slightest rolling hills. Eastward, billowing white clouds obscured the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I passed a bearded Amish man in a hat, blue shirt, and suspenders, guiding a horse-powered wagon. Next I slowed to pass a big Amish cart loaded with firewood and pulled by two draft horses, with two adorable children in the back and a man in standing in front to drive the horses along. Crossing into the park at 10:30 a.m., I sped along the winding two-lane roads of this lake-filled, mountain-bedecked forest wilderness and passed through Lake Placid, twice host of the Winter Olympics. I turned south from the tiny community of North Elba onto Heart Lake Road, which offers one of the most picturesque mountain vistas in all the East, looking up to Indian Pass, Algonquin Peak, Mount Colden, and Mount Marcy, which together offer some of the finest mountain hiking in the Adirondacks. This was the ideal place to end my search for spring and to bag my last two breeding wood warblers.

  JULY FROST

  I set up my tent in the hemlock-shaded campground of the Adirondak Loj, right on tiny Heart Lake in the bosom of the High Peaks. As I worked, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet in a young Eastern Hemlock greeted me at eye level. A Blue-headed Vireo sang his syrupy song in a maple. And a female Purple Finch perched at the very pinnacle of a mature spruce.

  In the afternoon, I hiked a steep and rocky trail to the summit of nearby Mount Jo, which looks over Heart Lake to th
e highest summits in the mountain wilderness. The half-hour climb granted a superb view of the best of the Adirondacks. Sitting atop a big, flat block of anorthosite granite, I was content to be in this spot at this time, close to the end of my cross-country adventure. Abby Katsos, an Adirondack Mountain Club intern, greeted me; she spent the days on Mount Jo to educate arriving hikers about wise treatment of the mountain summit vegetation and to answer questions about the park and its natural history. Katsos, from Pittsburgh, was interested in animal tracking. During my hour on Mount Jo, I was visited by Cedar Waxwings, a Myrtle Warbler, and a Dark-eyed Junco. Up here, the Balsam Firs were fruiting like mad, each with an abundance of erect deep-blue cones. When these cones mature and open, groups of winter finches will descend upon them, competing with Red Squirrels for the dining bonanza.

  Looking south from North Elba to the Adirondack High Peaks

  On my hike down to camp, I stopped at the Loj’s nature center and met Heart Lake’s three summer naturalists (what a wonderful place for them to spend the summer). Together we talked about breeding birds and speculated on where I might find a Brown Creeper—a common species that had eluded me over the three months of my journey. The naturalists knew their stuff and gave me hints on where to search.

  The Adirondak Loj, owned by the Adirondack Mountain Club, serves as the club’s center of summer operations. The Loj grounds were once the site of a woodland retreat built by Henry Van Hoevenburg, who named Heart Lake and Mount Jo (the latter for his fiancée, Josephine Scofield). The original Loj burned in a forest fire in 1903, and the current, smaller structure was built in 1927. Today it provides food and lodging for hikers and campers year-round and is a beloved destination in the High Peaks region of the great park—there’s nothing quite like completing a big climb and returning to the Loj for a hearty meal and a good night’s recuperation, with Barred Owls hooting into the night.

  Why is it Adirondak Loj and not Adirondack Lodge? Melvil Dewey, president of nearby Lake Placid Club, purchased the Loj from Van Hoevenburg in 1900. Dewey, an American librarian and educator and inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, was also a supporter of a shift to simplified spelling of American English words. He put his belief into practice, condensing his first name from the traditional Melville as well as eliding the c in Adirondack and transforming the dge of Lodge into a simple j. Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie created the Simplified Spelling Board, which sought to make English simpler, phonetic, and thus more palatable as a global language. Roosevelt and Dewey used this spelling in their correspondence, but it was a difficult sell to Congress and the public, and it resulted in only minor changes to our common language (e.g., plow instead of plough; honor instead of honour).

  The Adirondack Mountain Club, founded in 1922, today has twenty-eight thousand members and twenty-seven chapters across New York State. The club is among the powerhouse advocacy groups fighting to preserve the wilderness values of the Adirondacks and promoting the educational value of the wilderness experience for young and old alike. The club maintains and restores hiking trails, protects and restores sensitive alpine plant communities on high summits, teaches outdoor skills, and offers guided hikes and adventures. It works closely with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to ensure far-sighted management of Adirondack Park.

  July 3, my first morning in the Adirondacks, was cold enough to require gloves and wool cap at my campsite. The dawn broke with exuberant song by American Robins and Red-eyed Vireos, and I biked out to South Meadows in search of birds. The meadows sparkled under a coating of frost in the early sunlight: the very last breath of boreal spring. A Swainson’s Thrush sang from a thicket of Balsam Fir. A sapsucker drummed in the distance. A Black-capped Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Blue-headed Vireo, Ovenbird, Common Yellowthroat, and Magnolia Warbler welcomed me to the meadow.

  Then I walked the trail circumnavigating Heart Lake in search of a Brown Creeper. The preceding afternoon, one Loj naturalist had pointed me to this trail as a good spot for this retiring species. I found thickets of Hobblebush, a big stand of old Sugar Maples, and a Snowshoe Hare, but no creeper. Postwalk, I stopped for a hot breakfast at the Loj, served family-style at big rustic tables, and I had great fun chatting with the mix of guests who had come from all over.

  Later in the morning, I drove north to the trailhead for Pitchoff Mountain, which looks across the narrow chasm of the Cascade Lakes to the summit of Cascade Mountain. I would climb Pitchoff rather than Cascade Peak because, on this Saturday in early July, the trail up Cascade likely would be thronged with hikers wanting to bag one of the “Adirondack 46” (the forty-six peaks in the park that are over four thousand feet tall). Pitchoff, a lesser mountain, would be quieter. The climb to its summit overlook was very steep, but once there I commandeered a section of rocky ledge, with the bright sun rising above the summits. The mountaintop conifers harbored singing Nashville and Myrtle Warblers, Red-eyed Vireos, White-throated Sparrows, and, of course, Swainson’s Thrush. A surprise awaited me up here, too: a pair of Peregrine Falcons racing about through the narrow valley between the mountains. On a breathtaking fly-by, one raptor’s wings made a tearing noise as they sliced through the chilled late-spring air.

  On July 4, the morning’s first birds included a Wild Turkey, a Ruffed Grouse, a sapsucker, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, and—new for the trip!—a Brown Creeper. I located the shy little bird when I heard its tinkling territorial song in a dark thicket of hemlocks.

  After biking down to the Loj for the hot breakfast, I headed off to climb Mount Van Hoevenburg. The trail from South Meadows travels through an old Red Pine plantation and a large beaver swamp, and then climbs gradually up the back of the mountain, which is home to the Olympic bobsled run on its north side. From the summit ledge on the back of the mountain, which is a northern outlier, one can look south to the whole panorama of the Adirondack High Peaks, which were cloud-free this morning. On the summit, I was serenaded by a confiding Winter Wren, a Blue Jay, a White-throated Sparrow, and a Myrtle Warbler. On the hike down, I came upon several noisy sapsuckers, a Black-throated Blue Warbler (a quest bird!) in the deciduous growth, and a Mourning Warbler in the beaver swamp. The day ended with a thunderstorm, which I waited out in my car, cooking dinner late, after the rain had cleared off. I had finished reading in my tent when loud reports began to echo down the valleys from Lake Placid town: Independence Day fireworks. They seemed to go on forever. I was far enough away that I could drift off, with thoughts of my big climb planned for the following morning.

  July 5 broke cool and fine. From a clearing I looked up to the MacIntyre Range and the moon above it, without a cloud anywhere. I would be headed up that way this morning. By 5 a.m., I was biking south to the trailhead for Marcy Dam. It would take me three hours to summit Algonquin Peak—at 5,115 feet, the second-highest mountain in the Adirondacks. Here I would complete my three-month journey, add my last quest bird (plus the last nonquest bird of the trip), and finish up with a live radio interview with Ray Brown on his show, Talkin’ Birds.

  The wooded low country was busy with birds this morning: Swainson’s Thrushes, Ovenbirds, and Blue-headed Vireos. As I climbed the initial ridge, I found Bunchberry in fresh flower—I was retreating earlier into spring as I gained elevation. I was the first hiker on the mountain this morning. The trail was mainly sloping shield rock, with small streams coursing down the rough granite face in many places, and my hiking boots gripped it well as I moved higher and higher. I passed through a section that had been burned long ago; a nearly pure stand of aging Paper Birch was dying out and being replaced by Balsam Fir. By 7:30 a.m., I was in pure Balsam Fir, where I heard my first Blackpoll Warbler, a species I had seen in migration but whose boreal-montane breeding habitat I was now entering for the first time on the trip. It was a treat to get a close look at the black-capped, white-cheeked, yellow-legged male moving gingerly among the fir boughs, its high-pitched song—ts ts ts ts ts ts ts ts ts—
barely discernible except at very close range.

  Black-throated Blue Warbler

  Proceeding up the mountain a few minutes later, I heard the thin, rapid musical phrases of Bicknell’s Thrush from a nearby thicket of Balsam. It was species number 259 of the hundred-day field trip, and the last bird of my journey. This mountaintop will-o’-the-wisp, rarely seen in migration, is found in summer only in the spruce-fir zone of Northeast mountains and in winter in remnant tropical upland forests of Hispaniola and Cuba. Hearing this Neotropical migrant’s reeling song is one of the treats of the Adirondack High Peaks. The singer had a black-spotted breast, olive-brown upper parts, and dark eyes, looking like a small version of the more common and widespread Swainson’s Thrush. Both of these thrush species distinguish themselves by their lovely territorial songs. The Bicknell’s upland forest wintering habitat on Hispaniola is under threat. Moreover, the many small patches of mountaintop habitat in the Northeast could lose their ability to host Bicknell’s Thrush under the growing influence of climate change. The Vermont Center for Ecostudies, through its ongoing field studies, is working to develop programs to ensure the health of both wintering and summering populations of the thrush.

  As I climbed higher, the firs became more stunted. Before long I was in the open, and the vast Adirondacks spread out in all directions—forests in various shades of green, dark lakes, and mountains of varying shades of green, blue, and purple, depending on distance. I reached the high, rocky summit at 8:20 a.m., sharing the heavenly perch with only birds and alpine wildflowers. The wind blew strongly from the northwest, and a thin mist passed over the rocky dome, chilling me to the bone. I pulled out my fleece and found a sheltered rocky niche in the lee of the summit to soak up the sun while being protected from the cutting wind.