Watching a site where a family began

A week or so passed before I ventured far enough down-slope to see the spot where a family was started.

The flat rock, protected from weather by a rock/earth overhang, had been used not too many years previous by a nesting pair of Common Ravens. A collection of sturdy, weathered sticks – likely pulled from snags and live trees – marked the nesting site. I photographed it at least a dozen times, but those pix were taken with slide film and I just can’t fathom the notion of loading tray after tray of slides onto my aged projector to find the Raven nest pix. (The slides are priceless as slide film and slide projectors aren’t freely available anymore.)

Ravens, known by the scientific name Corvus corax, haven’t nested now for at least two decades on that ledge that’s part of the Council Cup promontory overlooking the Susquehanna River valley. But Peregrine Falcons returned as nesters a few years into the new century, a sign that a bit of avian wildness had returned to the river valley.

Ravens, though, remain a favorite of mine because even to hear one croak as it flies over, oftentimes too distant to see with naked eyes, is a positive sign of Wild Nature.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s allaboutbirds.org Web site says this about the calls of ravens: “Common Ravens make many different kinds of calls varying from a low, gurgling croak to harsh grating sounds and shrill alarm calls. Scientists have placed their vocalizations into as many as 33 different categories based on sound and context.

“The most commonly heard is the classic gurgling croak, rising in pitch and seeming to come from the back of the throat. It’s much deeper and more musical than a crow’s simple, scratchy caw. Ravens make this call often. It’s audible for more than a mile, and ravens often give it in response to other ravens they hear in the distance. Among their other calls, ravens make short, repeated, shrill calls when chasing predators or trespassers, and deep, rasping calls when their nests are disturbed.

“Dominant females sometimes make a rapid series of 12 or so loud knocking sounds that lasts about a second. Common Ravens can mimic other birds, and when raised in captivity can even be taught words.”

You can listen to the classic cr-r-ruck call and other sounds ravens make at www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Raven/sounds

In Pennsylvania, ravens like forested mountainous areas. Many times, though, while observing and tallying birds for the Southern Bradford County Christmas Bird Count, ravens voiced their thoughts, their rasping notes carrying for long distances across the otherwise quiet early-winter landscape. But the species sometimes shows up in spots closer to humans. On overnight visits to a friend’s home at Boalsburg, Centre County, it was commonplace to both see and hear ravens nearby.

How do tell a raven apart from the more common American Crow? The principle field mark is size: Ravens are much larger. Allaboutbirds.org offers these clues: “Not just large but massive, with a thick neck, shaggy throat feathers, and a Bowie knife of a beak. In flight, ravens have long, wedge-shaped tails. They're more slender than crows, with longer, narrower wings, and longer, thinner ‘fingers’ at the wingtips.

“Common Ravens are entirely black, right down to the legs, eyes, and beak. Common Ravens aren’t as social as crows; you tend to see them alone or in pairs except at food sources like landfills. Ravens are confident, inquisitive birds that strut around or occasionally bound forward with light, two-footed hops. In flight they are buoyant and graceful, interspersing soaring, gliding, and slow flaps.”

A raven that was rehabilitated from an injury is now among the educators at The Wild Center, the natural history museum of the Adirondacks, Tupper Lake, N.Y.

Nieces and I watched studiously as a museum docent – raven perched on his gloved hand – told museum visitors the bird’s life history. For me, it sparked memories of “Ravens in Winter” author Bernd Heinrich’s visit to Penn State Hazleton for an early 90s’ public lecture.

Roads and the future of wildlife

This is a fresh newspaper column from me

Almost from the moment in 1988 when my late wife and I moved to Conyngham from the Air Force base at Plattsburgh, N.Y., I began keeping track of roadkill – the native wildlife species I came across while hiking and fitness-walking on the many rural roads surrounding the borough in both Sugarloaf and Butler townships.

The list-keeping has continued ever since and also includes roadkills found in other states, both East and West. Most of the species I annotated in field notebooks (I’m now in my fourth volume) were, however, found on Pennsylvania roads. That’s simply a matter of having spent more time exploring, hiking, walking and cycling in Pennsylvania than elsewhere.

It takes very little to stir my memories of those journeys on foot. It happened again this week as I scanned through my photo library, coming across images of dead wildlife from those years.

There, see those eyes? I wonder what that Eastern Cottontail (that’s the official name for a creature most folks label a “rabbit”) would say if it had a chance? The photo, snapped with a first-generation digital camera on West County Road in Sugarloaf, shows the cottontail on the asphalt ribbon’s shoulder, its dark eyes staring upward, frozen in time.

Most roadkill, whether found on Butler Drive in Conyngham or on any other road, amounts to a carcass flattened almost to the point of making species identification difficult. But not this cottontail.

Even making a good guess at the roadkill data in Pennsylvania, or any other state, is hard-to-impossible as even keeping track of the dead of one species – the white-tailed deer – is tricky and time consumptive.

One thing for sure, though. Pennsylvania has to be the dead white-tailed deer champion throughout the species’ wide range. There are several factors at play in that estimation. From the ecological side is this: Pennsylvania has a lot of edge habitat; edge habitat favors habitat generalists, like the white-tail and raccoons, squirrels, opossums, skunks and more. And just like in other eastern states, Pennsylvania keeps on creating even more edge habitat (e.e., the zone between one habitat type (forest) and another (the shoulder of a road). Our society’s zeal for sprawl development and our reliance on the private automobile (the machine that made sprawl happen) mean even more edge habitat and more deer.

My field notebooks tell me this: I’ve now tallied the roadkill dead of 157 animal species, from bumblebees and green darners up to sapsuckers, screech owls, Canada goose, and on and on and on. My overall tally (and, again, most of those numbers were tallied in Pennsylvania) is, surely, quite conservative in scope.

If we were ever able to put together an entire team of naturalists to go out and, say, over a 24-hour period, keep track of every roadkill species found, the final tally would be much higher than what my own field notes reflect.

The solution?

Walk, not drive your car, when you can. Live in already established neighborhoods. Tell your borough council or township supers you do not like the idea of more sprawl development.

And tell them you want our community to be as friendly as it can be toward bicyclists and walkers – forms of transportation that keep practitioners slim, fight obesity, and burn calories, not fossil fuels.

And which save wildlife – our natural heritage.

Look carefully at the accompanying photo of an Eastern Cottontail: What do those eyes tell you?

State agency game farming is not compatible with ecosystem integrity

And neither is the very unscientific creation of edge habitat in a state that's full of man-created edge habitat, as I saw on State Game Lands 141 and Nescopeck State Park in Pennsylvania. The machines that did the nasty work were there by order of the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Well, it's been nearly 20 years since it happened and the creation of even more edge habitat in the state marches on. Complicit in this very anti-conservation biology course of events is the whole governmental enterprise, from the township and borough level on up to Harrisburg.
What's wrong with edge habitat? It is the favored habitat of habitat generalists, like white-tailed deer, skunk, raccoons and many more small predators. And it lowers the nesting success of forest-interior species, like wood thrush. Read what conservationist George Wuerthner thinks.