Beautiful Elegant Honking Predator

No question that at first glance the Great Blue Heron seems an elegant bird, a graceful flapper, a stately stander. But when it opens its trap and emits a guttural honk as if its sinuses were plugged, you can’t help but be jarred.

This same thing of beauty is a relentless and ruthless hunter that will stand still until a fish, instinctively trying to hide, seeks the heron’s silhouette of shade. Then – whap – the bird strikes and, if successful, shakes the fight out its prey before gulping it down its gullet whole.

Put both these incongruities together – the beautiful elegant honking predator – and you gain a glimpse into the cove’s ongoing territorial squabble between two herons, one larger than the other, battling over feeding rights to the cove.

I’ve been noticing the smaller bird chased away on several occasions this summer, but, one late afternoon this week, the level of drama heightened when the smaller of the two floated in, landing on a clump of lilies in front of my cottage, giving me a front-row seat.

A minute later, the larger heron, starting its flight from the other side of the lake, gracefully flapped in, and began its dry-cough honking as it approached the intruder. The smaller heron flew away, and the larger heron, instead of staying to fish, returned on the same flight path across the lake, having successfully protected, from more than a quarter mile away, its feeding ground.

Jeepers Peepers

Sure sign of spring, the mating call of the peeper, a tiny frog with a piercing voice. Heard in wetlands from one end of New York State to the other, and many other states, reportedly. Check out Wikipedia, if you really must know more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Peeper

Can remember a spring ride taken last year along route 17 from Sullivan to Chautauqua Counties. Could even hear their piercing croaks from the car, zipping along at 60 miles an hour, windows rolled down.



Amazing creatures. Saw one once, very tiny. My meditative ear locked on to the lilliputian perpetrator a couple of feet away, and let the music bore into my head. It does to the ears what a momentary glance to the sun does to the eyes, temporarily blunting the sense.

This Youtube doesn't do the sound justice. It's taken 10 feet from the lake's edge. Gives an idea, however.

Mohican Lake Autumn in Photos and Video

Beaver Update

Look what those blasted beavers did in four short days. They've gnawed through half of one of my prize oak trees.



I had to make an emergency trip to Home Depot to buy mesh fencing, which online research showed as recommended prevention. Another night, and they'd have taken it down, or striped the bark completely around its circumference. That would have killed it.



There are two types of oaks on my property, swamp oaks and pin oaks. They go for the thinner barked pin oaks. I won't know until next year how severely damaged it is. I hope it makes it.

The Sign of the Beaver

Ticked off about describes me after I noticed that a beaver had taken a 10-year old oak tree from my property, leaving a bitten-down stump.

Beavers have caused a lot of destruction to my neighbor’s oaks, bringing down a sizable tree a couple of years ago and chomping halfway through a couple of others. Mine they've left alone, until now.

I have about 25 mature trees on my property, mostly swamp oaks, but few saplings to continue the woodsy atmosphere after the old-timers kickoff.

This tree I’d been nursing. It had competed successfully with thousands of acorns and hundreds of saplings, and had found ample space and light between two majestic, fully mature, late-in-life swamp oaks. Then some thieving beaver came along and cut its life short.

Earlier this summer, one of my city guests -- just arrived from the train station -- looked out the picture window and pointed out a beaver unconcernedly munching a lily pad, and probably dreaming of the day he (the beaver, I mean, not my friend) could sink his teeth into one of my beloved trees. You bet I’m ticked off.

Swimming in October?

I’ve done the backstroke in October every year since I moved to Mohican Lake in June 2003. In fact, I used to keep track of my final swim of the season. For example, my last dip in 2003 was October 8th.

Last year I jumped in – and quickly jumped out -- on October 19th. Brrr. Today, October 10th, I didn’t simply wet myself, I did the Australian crawl.

The water seems much warmer than in past years but I have no scientifically measured empirical proof, only hazy recollections. If I were more Thoreau-like – or more thorough – I'd be keeping records of water temperature, and noting rainfall, lake levels, and day and nighttime air temperatures, because all have probably contributed to this year’s extra-warm water.

For example, we’ve had little rainfall in 45 days until last night’s deluge, which came in a storm which blew from the south. Also, the lake level has dropped at least a foot and a half since this spring, judging from rock discoloration. This makes the water significantly shallower. Shallow water heats faster and mostly we’ve had hot days and warm nights.

And we haven’t had a frost, only three or four nights in the 30’s. If we’d had cooler nights, the leaves would be more colorful and further turned.

If this sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. This late fall makes up for a very late spring (which I also only hazily recollect), and I’m loving it. One of these days I intend to take a dip in November. See video below:

Turtles on the Brain

The naturalist John Burroughs observed that if you think “arrowheads,” you’ll find arrowheads in every field. Is it the same for turtles?

Yesterday, I saw turtles everywhere. Was I just thinking “turtles” or was there another reason I spotted so many painted turtles soaking up the sun?

Painted turtles do what is known as basking because they can’t generate their own heat. Either they’ll float just under the water’s surface, or they’ll climb onto a log and bask for hours at a time.



However, too much heat can kill a turtle in several minutes. This probably explains why I don’t see many basking turtles on hot summer days, and why I do now as summer wanes and temps here at night descend to the upper thirties. In other words, seeing turtles everywhere is not psychological; they aren’t Jungian symbols of creative ideas bubbling up from the subconscious. Hah!

By the end of October, these creatures will bury themselves in the mud and survive five to six months without oxygen. Who then can blame them for catching a few last rays? I did the same yesterday when I rowboated across the lake to do my own basking. Even took a refreshing swim, one of the last I’ll take I’m sure before my own winter hibernation.



Did you see it blink or did you blink?

Please Do/Don't Feed The Animals

I can never pass up a free meal, and neither, apparently, can many animals at Mohican Lake. Once these five-finned, four-legged, or two-winged friends get a handout, they return same time, same place, different day expecting another.

Although I no longer feed the birds or the chipmunks (see "Chippy the Chipmunk RIP" below), that hasn't deterred these creatures from turning up every morning with nosebags. As soon as I get close to the picture window, Nutty the nuthatch lands on the railing looking for sunflower seeds. And once Nutty alights, Chicky the chickadee or Titty the titmouse swoops in for a looksee.

Last year, cottage guests and I took baked chicken on the float for a late-afternoon dinner. The bits of chicken meat that we dropped into the water drew a voracious school of sunfish and blue gill. My guests were so tickled by the experience that they repeated this ritual for the rest of their stay. Weeks later fish would gather when I went to the float to swim. In fact, I had to cover a large brown mole on my back with a band aid because, if I swam at about 5 o'clock pm, fish would pick at it. (Ouch.)

Bald Eagles, too, aren't above scavenging, or even begging. During ice fishing season, the eagles will scoff down fish guts left on the ice by the fisherman. One winter, a full-grown bald eagle stood watch on the ice about 30 feet from a group of fisherman who were periodically throwing it fresh caught fish.

My brother tells this eagle story from one of his summer visits to Mohican Lake. An eagle, perched on the branch of a dead standing pine, watched my brother fish from a rowboat just off the northwest shore near Blueberry Island. He caught a perch, but instead of immediately dropping it in the water, he thought he'd throw it in the air to see what the eagle would do. That eagle launched from its perch on cue, missed the fish by yards, but proved it had probably done that before.

Herry The Heron Eats Crappie

I’ve been trying to get a good shot of a great blue heron catching or feeding on a fish. At least one of these shy and solitary birds has been flying in and out of the cove since this morning.

However, I've either run out of memory waiting for the right photo, or the bird turns his back on me, or he steps out of range, or some noise frightens the bird and he flees the cove. He’s even chased a smaller heron from his territory, but no luck getting the right shot, until it started pouring rain.

I looked out the window during the high point of the storm -- lightening, thunder, high winds -- and here comes Herry the Heron gracefully flapping into the cove, and choosing a spot very favorable to my photographing him from the front picture window.

Perfect time to hunt, too: no motor boats, no joggers, no golf carts or ATVs racing along the shore. Just loud claps of thunder, which, oddly, don’t bother him.

Wish I could say I got the perfect photo of him capturing a fish, but, again, my memory card was full. I even thought I had the best shot of the day, a long view of the lake, with a zoom into the heron.

So I uploaded the video onto my computer, emptied the card, and went back to the picture window. As I did, Herry plunged into the lilies. By the time my camera was positioned, the heron was trying to subdue and gulp down a good size crappie, as shown above.

Ice Thunder

I confess to having read Thoreau's WALDEN POND at an impressionable age, so when I heard ice thunder on Mohican Lake I had some vague knowledge of it. That may not describe the sound exactly, though it vibrates the ribcage the same way a deep clap of thunder does. Maybe "boom" or "resonant crack" expresses it better.

However, no description can convey the way it startles. From the living room it sounded as if something had knocked the house off its foundation.

I kept hearing it, too, so I went outside to listen. Sometimes the boom would start across the lake, sounding ever louder at irregular intervals until it reached the cove. Then it seemed to start in the cove, and roll to the opposite side. At other times I'd hear a single boom.

I assume I heard it because the lake had no snow cover. I don't remember hearing it the winter before when snow covered the ice, and I haven't heard it since a snowstorm blanketed the ice in February.

When I examined the ice, I noticed cracks of various lengths and depths, with some cracks seeming to run the full thickness of the ice, from 8-12 inches, according to an ice fisherman who'd drilled holes in several places. The boom probably occurs at the moment of cracking, or perhaps when these cracked sections of ice rub against or collide into each other.

Expansion and contraction must be the root cause of it. If you were to put a glass of water in the freezer, the water would freeze, expand and break the glass. Wind also might play a part. It seemed loudest during a very windy two day period.

A walk in Central Park that same week further illuminated the mystery. Ice on the pond by Bathesda Fountain had heaved, due to expansion, onto the concrete steps.

Thoreau's observations also help. Here's how he described hearing it on Walden Pond:

"The pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube."

Bald Eagle

Get this. It’s a Wednesday, about 3 in the afternoon. I’m a short 120 miles from the largest metropolis in the United States, in a row boat in the middle of a lake almost two miles long and a half mile wide. The temperature’s about 80, and I’m being pushed along by a warm wind. There’s not another boat on the lake. How is that possible?

I look back to my side of the lake, the western side, where cottages dot the shore. I see no one. I look easterly and see a pristine stretch of pine and swamp oak, and try to seek out the log that I think an eagle landed on the day before. I have to find out if the eagle that I saw from my picture window did indeed catch a fish in the middle of Mohican Lake.

It seems funny that two days before I was fighting the mobs on the subway to get to Penn Station, and pushing through those crowds to get a train to upstate New York. But every week up here I can count on at least one unforgettable encounter with nature, whether it's of a wasp carrying off a hunting spider, or of a pair of otters swimming in the cove.

Yesterday, it was the eagle, which I saw skimming the lake surface and flying to the log. Then, using a pair of binoculars, I tried to see if it were tearing into prey. Crows kept diving at it. I could hear them screeching even a half mile across the lake. But that’s not unusual. Whenever I’ve seen an eagle, I’ve almost always seen some other bird or birds driving it away. Birds as big as crows or as small as sparrows have serious issues with eagles. Then I thought that perhaps the scavenging crows were trying to drive the eagle from its prey, but after the eagle flew off and out of range, I didn’t see crows on the log.

So what happened? Had baldy caught a fish? That's what I mean to find out. I row closer, and see the sun glint off something shiny at the spot where I'm sure he fed. And I'm right, as evidenced by a pile of fish scales on the fore end of a waterlogged trunk of a pine.