Tear That Mountain Down

I'm delighted to tell you that Bird Watcher's Digest has a downloadable pdf version of my latest True Nature column, "Tear that Mountain Down" on its web site. I've written about mountaintop removal mining in previous blogposts, but this is a full treatment with photos. Click here to read it.

I'll give you a teaser:

It's tiny—barely 5" long—and it's hard to find, hard to see, and getting harder to add to a life list. The pose you have to strike to see one is standing, head thrown back as far as it will go on your shoulders, neck aching, peering up into the branches of an oak, watching for motion. And when you finally spot it and hear that maddening, hurried zur zur zur zur zur zreeee? coming out of its thin black bill, it doesn't look blue like it does on the field guide page. All you can see is a white belly and a thin black necklace, and you can't see even that for long, so quickly does it hop from twig to twig. Unless—unless you happen to be looking down on one, as I have for a couple of blazing moments, maybe twice in my life. Then you get a shot of the pure heavenly blue stretching crown to tail for which the cerulean warbler was named, and it all becomes clear why a minuscule bird should bear such an angelic title.

Cerulean warblers like rich deciduous forest, heavy on the oak, with rich soil and steep slopes. Ceruleans like mountains and clear-running streams. And in that habitat preference, which puts their center of abundance in Appalachia, is most of the reason it's getting so hard to find a cerulean warbler to check off your life list. The mountains that ring with warbler song, that have towered over Appalachia's streams and rivers since they first pushed up out of the ancient seabed, are being rapidly and systematically, if not cleanly, removed. Ammonium nitrate and fuel-oil explosives are pushed into their flanks, detonated; a huge cloud of earth and rocks shoots skyward; trillium and bloodroot, salamanders and box turtles along with it.

It is the vegetation that defines West Virginia for me, the riotous tangle of so many different trees, shrubs, vines, and wildflowers; ferns, mosses, and liverworts springing from the rich, wet soil, dripping with sweet rain. West Virginia has grown wild like this for eons, and the evidence is compressed in layers in the shale, not only in the fine handprints of ancient ferns, but in ebony lines and layers, the compacted growth of millions of years of plant life. And in the kind of irony that only humans can create, we obliterate the living, breathing plants to get at the black, oily, compacted ones, the ones we like to burn as coal.

Read on...

and forward it to your friends. We must stop the coal companies from tearing West Virginia and all of Appalachia out from under its inhabitants.

Misty Morning Birding, Teardrop in My Eye

It usually rains at the end of April and beginning of May in West Virginia. When I was corresponding with other members of the nature blogging Flock about the trip, I advised raingear, lots of it. And this turned out to be a very wet festival.

Which was something to deal with, but not a problem. People who love warblers are happy folks. They kept their sunny attitude.

The flowers were still lovely. Golden ragwort and cranesbill (wild geranium).
The magnificent large tree, Fraser magnolia, Magnolia fraseri.

The birds' colors were a bit compromised by the fog and rain. In sunlight, cerulean warblers are sky blue.


They still sang, if a little less persistently. Their black necklaces were all that distinguished them; their stunning blue backs would have to wait for better light, better days.


It was all very ricepaper and watercolor, very Japanese. Even a male scarlet tanager looked grayish in this light.

Well, it's shaped like a tanager... Photo by Nina.

The direction of light became paramount in getting a decent look at a bird. This northern parula cooperated for a nanosecond, showing his sunny breast.

As we walked, I noticed a female eastern towhee as she burst frantically from the ground. She appeared to have been trying to stay still, then lost her nerve. I knew that meant she was on eggs somewhere nearby. I split from the group and walked carefully along the foot of the bank.

And found the nest, using a laser pointer to show it to the festival participants. Photo by Nina.

Four white eggs, speckled with rust, well hidden in a grassy nest tucked into the bank, under a big multiflora rose. I wish her well.


Some black rat snake eggs were less fortunate. Examining these, I decided that they had been washed out after having been buried by the female snake last summer. The eggshells were unpunctured, but there was nothing inside. So it wasn't a predation event--it was a dessication event.


Red efts (the wandering, terrestrial, juvenile form of the red-spotted newt) were easier subjects than birds.

The smallest red eft I'd ever seen enchanted Nina. I'm sure he'll make an appearance on her blog, Nature Remains.

Katdoc joined her in the photoquest. Katdoc is geared out, full birding plumage.

Nina has ferocious focus. She folded up like a tripod and became one with the newt.


One of Nina's many gifts is looking very closely, and waiting.


Everyone moved on, which is just what Nina needed.

And she became a rock in the road, and captured the eft without touching it.


As Nina and I walked the last bit of Spruce Run Road, loosely known at the festival as Muddlety, we marveled at the abundant life all around us--prairie and blue-winged warblers, chat after yellow-breasted chat, redstarts and hooded warblers, the federally threatened cerulean warbler, scarlet tanagers, and everywhere the flutes of wood thrushes. A tear coursed down Nina's cheek, then another. We had both seen the coal company permit sign about halfway up the road, that, to those who know its significance, means that this entire woodland--all this habitat, all this mountain--is about to be blown up, never to be woodland habitat again.

When you flip a light switch on, there's a 50 percent chance that the energy you're using comes out of what used to be a mountain in West Virginia. Blowing up the richest and most diverse forest in the US--leveling these mountains-- to get the coal underneath it is not a sustainable way to get energy. It is insanity itself. It buries the streams, chokes the rivers and poisons the people. Please, please watch this five-minute video. Maria Gunnoe says it so much better than I ever could. And if you're moved to action, go to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition web site and see what you can do to stop this abomination. Muddlety probably won't survive, but there are so many more equally beautiful mountains--and communities, streams, rivers and lives-- the coal companies are planning to destroy.

Watch, then go. Keep spending your ecotourism dollars in West Virginia. All profits from the New River Birding Festival go to environmental education in local schools--a slow but, we hope, ultimately effective way to shout STOP THIS MADNESS!! Thank you.

And thank you, Cassandra.