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I grew up in the Maryland suburbs, where the natural world was experienced primarily as a smattering of wispy parks, bike paths through ribbons of second growth forests, and man made lakes sprinkled with paddle-boats and Canada geese. Even still, nature was a source of constant joy and revelation. Near my house was a stretch of low-lying woods bordering the Little Patuxent River--more creek than river, but a wonderland nonetheless.
Bordering the creek were a few wisened sycamore trees that must have been sentinels shading the lazy creek as it flowed past croplands and pastures, but were now largely hidden by the thick woods that had grown up around them. One of the sycamores was large and hollow enough to crawl inside and stand upright in the gloom, staring at imaginary bat-roosts. Even more impressive was an epic tulip-poplar, perhaps twenty feet in circumference, that stood guard over the bike path. Most of the woods however was newer growth, a few decades old, of oaks and straight young tulip-poplars--descendants perhaps of the giant near the path, who had seen the forest logged and was now there to witness its rebirth.
Every spring, part of the woods would flood, creating an ephemeral marshland which I was irresistibly drawn to when the first frogs of the year began their courtship. One of those springs, when the marsh was still cold enough to turn toenails blue and withered iris had barely begun to show green, I grabbed a bucket and slipped my sandaled feet into the embracing muck. With each step decaying vegetation slipped around my sandals, squelched in between my toes, and sucked up to my knees. Although the only calls I recognized were the ubiquitous spring peepers, I could hear other mysterious rumblings, quackings and croakings beckoning me from deeper into the marsh. Bats vibrated overhead. As the sun set and the roar of peepers became deafening, I spotted a fragile orb sitting suspended in the clearer waters near the middle of the marsh, where a stream riffled through on its way to the creek. I reached down and gently shepherded the clump of gelatinous eggs into my submerged bucket. Giddy from my find, I scampered home before the light failed.
The next morning I took out an old kiddy pool and filled it with water from the marsh, twitching with larval life and thick with decomposing leaves. To make the eggs feel at home, I planted a sprig of iris in the middle and then poured in the bucket. The grapefruit sized bunch of eggs settled, hovering, into the pool. Although hard to tell, it seemed that there were a hundred or so eggs, each individual a raisin sized morsel of clear jelly surrounding a murky greenish-brown embryo of undetermined expectations. I placed the kiddy pool in the shade underneath the deck, and waited.
Within a week the eggs had all hatched, and dozens of plump, golden-specked tadpoles were hiding in the leaf litter. Although I fed them fish food at times, they seemed to find all they needed among the maze of larvae, algae and compost that covered the bottom of their pool. Within a few weeks the first hind legs had started to nub out, and the ridged tails were starting to shrink. Within a month the tadpoles were looking decidedly frog-like, with little hands and legs delicately dangling from increasingly foreshortened bodies. As the tadpoles finished their metamorphosis, I placed a sloping mound of gravel in the pond, so that the froglets had a beach to haul out on. Finally, by the time the irises had bloomed, my mass of eggs had turned into a hopping, squirming mass of frogs.
A quick glance at a field guide taught me that I was the proud shepherd of a flock of wood frogs, Rana sylvatica. They were quite handsome—cocoa colored backs with creamy white bellies and charcoal bandit masks. Wood frogs are some of the most common breeders in vernal pools. These spring puddles will dry up by late summer, after they form a crucial breeding habitat for many small amphibious inhabitants of the temperate woods. I released the dozens of scampering bandits back into their marsh, fortunate that development had spared my own local vernal pool. The frogs soon vanished, perfectly camouflaged in the now drying patches of damp leaves. I wished them a good summer and fall of catching bugs, and a snug winter sleep. Come next spring I would be listening for any other strange sounds coming from the far corners of the marsh, and wondering who else was managing to carry on these ancient rituals in the shadows of gas stations, town homes and shopping malls.
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The neighborhood abounded with cold-blooded acquaintances. Merlin, the six foot long black rat snake that I scooped up from the bike path one chilly spring day, was gentle as a kitten and convinced me of the ultimate goodliness of snakes and their kin. Samantha, the box turtle rescued from a busy highway, would walk over to say hello (and receive a plate of bananas, dandelions, crickets and worms) when I came to her large temporary pen in my backyard; her intelligent brown eyes stared unnervingly. Asmodeus, the northern water snake found down by the creek, was better left undisturbed, as raw vehemence mixed with odious musk glands provides powerful deterrence. There were monstrous snapping turtles and bull frogs found by roadways and window-wells, toads by the hundreds spawning in the marsh, beautiful marbled salamanders with blue spots on black velvety skin, gray tree frogs like lichen covered bark, and superbly athletic leopard frogs.
Such cold-blooded creatures were not the only ones hiding out in forgotten floodplains and brambly thickets. There were also more fuzzy neighbors, such as bunnies. These bunnies were Eastern cottontails, crucial links in the suburban food-chain, turning manicured gardens into fleshy meals for predators such as great horned owls and foxes. One adult female cottontail can churn out 35 young a year, potentially leading to millions of rabbits in just a few generations if it were not for cottontails’ 80% plus annual mortality rate, as cottontails are frequent victims of disease and starvation as well as predation. I once uncovered a cottontail nest while mowing the lawn. The whole litter could fit into the palm of my hand, the tiny rabbit kits warm as light bulbs. Abandoned by their mother, and exposed by the trim grass, they didn’t last the night.
Cottontails are creatures of edges, and not often found in the interior of woods, preferring to stake out territories in closer proximity to lawns and fields. But in the woods themselves, the most prevalent tenants were the ever-present Eastern gray squirrels. Although they would frequently sally out into yards on daring bird-feeder raids, they were never far from the acorn scattered woods where they made their nests, raised their young, and hid from predators. A walk through the woods in the flush of fall would discoverer a cacophony of churning leaves as squirrels chased each other about in great torrents of activity, effortlessly pirouetting up and down the trunks and across the canopy, sending down streams of yellow and bronzed leaves fluttering to the forest floor, all the while maintaining incessant chattering fulminations. In winter they kept mostly to themselves, quietly searching out their stores of nuts amongst the icy ground and only sporadically tut-tutting as I passed too close to their perches where they sat wreathed in puffs of fur. In spring and summer, with baby squirrels snug in their spherical nests of tangled leaves and sticks, the squirrels were calmer, more discreet. But they were always there, watching from hidden battlements, constant companions of the suburban naturalist.
Sharing the squirrel’s trees, but always disappointingly out of sight, were families of raccoons. I spotted a raccoon in my childhood woods only once, way up in a tree and mostly hidden, although I’ve seen many elsewhere. But I have always known they were there, as my father had taught me to recognize their telltale hand-prints along the banks of the creek. And judging by the amount of hand-prints that used to be pressed into the sand and mud, there once must have been a number of raccoons making their way up and down the creek every night, hunting by feel for unwary frogs and crayfish. As I grew older, however, I found less and less hand-prints, and now they are a rare sight along the creek. There are less woods then there used to be, with more houses being built every year. Perhaps the raccoons no longer can find enough to eat in the increasingly silty creek, or perhaps there are not enough hiding places left. Raccoons are adaptable, however, and if there is a way for them to hang on, they’ll find it.
As I found fewer and fewer raccoon tracks, I found more and more deer tracks. Once a rare event, it is now a rare excursion into the woods that doesn’t stumble upon a white-tailed deer or two creeping along the understory, warily browsing everything in sight. These deer do not look like the deer in paintings hanging on hunting club walls, or the deer whose heads become trophies for display. They are mangy and skittish critters, sickly looking and prone to skulking rather than nobly striding. Deprived of natural predators, deer in the Eastern suburbs likely now exist at higher population densities than ever before, and their constant browsing has potentially damaging repercussions to the healthy growth of their forest ecosystem. But to stumble across them, ears erect, white-tails alert, with a fawn bedded down in a tangle of ivy, and an antlered buck, muscles twitching, staring right through you, is still a deep thrill, an encounter with beings who rightly personify these shade-dappled woods.
Another formerly elusive mammal in the woods has likewise increased its presence noticeably over the years. A few years back, I spied a red fox streaking across the path right in front of me. I stopped to ponder her route, and was soon distracted by a tussling of red fur just a few yards from the path. Standing on top of an inconspicuous mound was a whole litter of red fox pups. They paused to assess me, and then started to play, racing around the den and crouching and pouncing as each sibling tried to sneak up on one another. Their mother must have run off at my approach, but the pups, too curious perhaps for their own good, had come out of the den to examine this strange creature, and soon bored, had set about to entertain themselves. A week later the den was uninhabited, and the fox pups had likely followed their mother off to a more secluded spot. Hopefully there in the woods they remain, harrying the cottontails and squirrels, picking up the traces of the few raccoons left amongst the overwhelming scent of deer.
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Of course there must be other mammals sharing the woods--mice, voles, moles, shrews, flying squirrels, and the like, not to mention the bats I don’t know how to identify. I joyously spotted a young beaver heading up the creek once, but as soon as he tried to create a home for himself he would have been trapped and relocated, as natural hydrological engineering is no longer favored by low-lying homeowners. In general, however, most mammals stay well out of sight, and are barely ever noticed. Even considering the antics of squirrels and the stature of deer, by far the most readily observed actors throughout the woods are clothed in feathers, not fur. In the cold dead of winter or the stagnant heat of summer, there are always birds winging their way through the trees, singing their stories and enlivening the woods. Without the birds of backyard feeders and forested remnants, the suburbs would be a veritable desert of vertebrate activity. Because of birds, however, many suburbs still shelter a great diversity of wild creatures to admire, with my woods being no exception.
One family of birds in particular rules the old wooded stomping grounds: the woodpeckers. A lucky explorer can find six species of woodpecker there, often within just a few hundred yards of each other. The most noticeable is the red-bellied woodpecker, a striking and gregarious bird with a carmine-red cap complimenting bold black-and-white barring on the wings and back. The red-bellied’s querulous call is one of the most frequent sounds of the woods, regardless of season, and can usually be traced back to its maker high up in a tree, picking through bark on the hunt for invertebrates.
Equally common, but usually more subtle, is the downy woodpecker, a small black-and-white woodpecker that favors small twigs and branches. If you are lucky, you might find the downy’s remarkably similar looking larger cousin, the hairy woodpecker, which is more likely to be clambering up larger branches and trunks. Both woodpeckers can be tracked down by their similar squeaks and punctuated giggles.
If you stumble across a woodpecker that seems to be pecking at the ground, you’ve likely found a common flicker, whose laughing call sounds almost hawk-like, but whose diet consists mainly of ants. However you might have found instead the lord of all Eastern woodpeckers, the great pileated woodpecker, who too sometimes eats insects on the ground, but will be immediately apparent as the inspiration for woody woodpecker, complete with glorious crest and resounding cackle.
The last woodpecker of my woods is more difficult to find, but a good way to start is to seek out grid-like arrangements of many rectangular holes on tree trunks. It is here that the yellow-bellied sapsucker comes to suck sap that it has produced by scarring the tree through regular ministrations. Although sapsuckers are generally only found in the woods near the creek while migrating through the area in spring and fall, the rest of the woodpeckers can be found year round, and often provide the only splash of sound and color to an otherwise dreary winter’s walk.
The more friendly feeder birds can also be found in the woods, and it is a rare walk that doesn’t find carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and Northern cardinals. Along the edges and in sunny meadow patches there are house finches and American goldfinches. In winter, American robins, Eastern bluebirds, and cedar waxwings all flock around berry laden bushes, as do less frequently seen hermit and Swainson’s thrushes during migration. Wrens call from the brambles--Carolina wrens in summer and winter wrens when one would expect. And during the flush of spring and fall migration, great hordes of technicolored birds--warblers, grosbeaks, and tanagers--on their way to and from their more secluded breeding grounds can be found gleaning for insects amongst the leaves and branches, while ruby-throated hummingbirds buzz from flower to flower along the forest floor.
The two most exciting birds of the woods, however, were heard far more often than seen. In spring the woods resounds with the keeyar-keeyar call of a nesting pair of red-shouldered hawks, stationed high up in one of the creek-side sycamores. Red-shouldered hawks are particularly adept hunters of the cold-blooded forest inhabitants, and many a snake or plump frog finds its way up into their nest every year. If you are lucky, you can catch a glimpse through the trees of one of the pair soaring over the forest, sun streaming through the translucent panels that appear as small commas near the ends of each wing.
At night the red-shouldered hawk’s nocturnal equivalent takes over, announcing the shift with raspy hootings echoing deep in the woods. Barred owls are shy birds, and their beautiful mottled plumage makes them particularly difficult to spot during the daylight hours. But once in a great while a walk through the woods will encounter one of these wise sages on its day roost, perched in a recess of a gnarled old sycamore tree. The owl will always spot you first, their deep earth-colored eyes fixing you immobile in your tracks. Having been so fortunate, you apologize to the owl for the disturbance, and after paying your respects, return the way you came.
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The creek too has its share of life. For many summers, I took a special joy in heading out to a secret spot where the waters of the creek curved around a deep bend. I would enter the creek downstream, so as not to disturb my quarry. Along these straight sections of the creek, minnows of indeterminate species would dart back and forth from pool to pool, sometimes stopping in a strand of sun, sending sparkling reflections across the sandy bottom. But bordering a particularly deep undercut bank lay a few large slabs of stone surrounded by many pebbles, and here I stopped. This was the den of beasts.
I would reach my hands into the cool water--a refreshing contrast to the hot Maryland summer--and in one smooth motion lift up a rock with one hand while grabbing inside the resulting cloud of muck with the other. If all went well, I would remove my hand from the fray holding a giant thrashing crayfish, a miniature lobster with a violent disposition and powerful pinchers. When grabbed around the midsection, however, they were unable to do harm, and I would place my catch in a bucket in order to better admire its great strength and beauty. That rocky stretch could produce upwards of ten crayfish if properly attended to, and after they were all properly bucketed and admired--an event that would often regrettably be accompanied by unnecessary fights between the dominant crayfish so unnaturally confined--I would slip them back into the creek, to catch again another day.
Crayfish were the most exciting invertebrate inhabitants of the creek and its surrounding woods, but they were certainly not the only ones. Water bugs, beetles and striders glided and swum about the waters. Tiger beetles flashed emerald along the path, multitudes of spiders strung webs seemingly wherever I wished to walk, mosquitoes and ticks exacted their price of entry, and beautiful butterflies flitted about the sunny glades.
All told, my small patch of woods was a paradise of wild delights. As the thirst for new development encroaches upon yet more and more remnant threads of water and forest, I hope that these unheralded fragments are recognized for how precious they truly are. Saving them will not preserve any endangered species, or prevent any overarching ecological collapse. Nearly all species that dwell there are common and widespread, or if not, likely doomed. But even so, the species that remain may prove the only contact that a suburbanite child might have with the world of nature on his or her own terms, and that in and of itself is surely worth preserving.
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| the woods in winter - picture by my brother Steven McNamara |
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