Eclipse Bathing

I got an unusual suntan today. It will all probably wear off in a week or two, but I have to say, the eclipse was transformative, even without making the trip to see totality.

It was a day when some of the world's greatest telescopes were trained on the sun. Okay, maybe this cereal box wasn't one of them.

My dad designed great telescopes (Twins! What a surprise!) on Las Campanas in Chile, so that kind of took the pressure off for his offspring.

Still, the performance of the cereal box with a pinhole was, in my view, subpar. It was time to put on a thinking cap. Fortunately, I'd read an email from the Princeton Public Library, earlier in the day, with a link to Neil Degrasse Tyson's alternative approach. Use a colander, he said.

At first, it didn't seem to be working. I wasn't seeing anything special, though I began feeling an inexplicable craving for those pecan crescents my mom used to make at Christmas time.

Then came the eureka moment. Let the colander cast a shadow on the patio stones.

How cool is that? A whole bunch of crescent pastas bloomed on the ground. Yum!

Leo was suspicious, and gave it a sniff.

But I wasted no time, doing what any normal person would do in the presence of a rare celestial event: shoot a selfie. That's me trying to compete with the eclipse's many-smiled head while on our summer vacation in the backyard. You won't believe the deal we got on a hotel room.

To save time--the eclipse's visit being so brief--I shot a photo of the colander while my shadow shot a photo of the colander's shadow. That's my younger daughter's shadow assisting.

Here's the eclipse posing with its grandfather,

and with Leo.

An obit of my dad says that in 1945 he traveled to Canada with theoretical astrophysicist and future Nobel Prize winner Chandresekhar, to photograph a total eclipse of the sun. They published the photos they took there in a scientific paper.

Sometimes I look up towards the sky and wonder what he'd think of his son's life orbit. He pointed his cameras skyward, but the images had gravitas. I'm more apt to point a camera at the earth, even when the subject is an eclipse, finding levity on the ground rather than gravitas in the heavens.

It all works out, I guess, especially after this weird tan wears off.

Fledgling Black Vultures at Herrontown Woods

A pair of vultures has long hung out around the Veblen Cottage, up along the red trail in Herrontown Woods. They can seem a bit creepy, perched on top of the chimney, haunting the building with their symbolism of decline and imminent demise. But I've also seen vultures perched on restored buildings, and over time I've stopped investing them with negative connotations.

These are black vultures, as opposed to the turkey vultures that are frequently mistaken for hawks as they glide deftly above Princeton's treetops. Turkey vultures have red heads, and can be distinguished overhead by the silver that lines the back half of the underside of their wings. Black vultures have grayish heads, and silver only on the tips of the wings.

This quote from the Cornell Lab's Birds of North America site suggests that Herrontown Woods' pair of black vultures has a deep and lasting relationship, and has been finding what they need there, year after year. Perhaps they've been raising their young in the corncrib all this time, unbeknownst to us.

"Black Vultures do not build a nest. Instead they lay their (usually two) eggs on the bare ground in a cave, hollow tree, abandoned building, or other dark recess. Pairs will continue to use a nest site for many years as long as breeding is successful. Black Vultures are monogamous and maintain long-term pair bonds. The pair associate closely year round and may feed their young for as many as eight months after fledging. This prolonged dependence of the young on their parents may, in part, be responsible for the strong social bonds with kin that Black Vultures maintain throughout their lives."

A couple days ago, I was walking by the cottage and noticed a strange site. Up ahead, standing outside the barn door, was one of the black vultures, its fluffy neck feathers all a'jumble. Another vulture was perched in a low branch behind the cottage. Neither flew away as I approached.

The vulture on the ground looked embarrassed, its head down. It walked into the barn and stood there, as if deeply sad. They were either juveniles or molting adults.

Later, I remembered that last year in August a friend had noticed that geese had disappeared from Mountain Lakes. Some research showed they had gone off to molt at an undisclosed location.

I asked some birders with the Friends of Rogers Refuge if vultures molt this time of year, after finding nothing about it on the internet. Laurie Larson replied:

"I know they molt wing feathers during the summer, after their young fledge, and it would be consistent with most other species of birds to molt the rest of the body at the same time. This time of year most birds have less demands on their energy than they would during migration, winter, or when rearing young, and food is relatively abundant, so it’s the time of year to put energy into growing feathers. Embarrassed-looking vultures… interesting thought!"

After seeing the photos, however, she wrote back:

I think the vulture by the door in your photo is probably actually a fledgling. The adults are bald - their heads have bare skin. I’ve never seen a vulture so young, so I didn’t know they had black fuzz on their necks. It’s also possible that the reason it didn’t leave is that it isn’t yet a very good flyer. (It’s hard to tell whether the second bird, sitting in a tree, is another juv. or an adult). Wikipedia does have a portrait of a juvenile, which seems to be somewhat older than yours. It has a fully feathered neck rather than the bare whitish adult skinhead look. Yours is just growing those feathers. Congratulations; this would seem to be a rare look at a very young vulture.

The timing is right as well. Local nesting starts around April 1. Wikipedia says the eggs hatch in 28 - 41 days; and after hatching the young require 75-80 days to grow to be flying independently. That puts it around August 1.

As you may know, Black Vultures have expanded their range north through New Jersey rather rapidly and now are being seen throughout New England to southern Maine. When I started doing the Princeton Christmas Bird Count in 1982, I was assigned the territory including Mountain Lakes and Woodfield Reservation. Black Vultures began to show up in the huge roost that existed at Coventry Farm during the 1980s (the elder Mrs. Winant, rest her soul, used to feed them dog food every morning) and the numbers increased rapidly until the roost was dispersed after her death. One of the first nests in the state was found in a shed in Monmouth County, while locally an early nest was on the Princeton ridge in a cave near the bouldering area called Cradle Rock, up behind Woodfield. The area had not yet been developed with all the huge houses along Drakes’ Corner Road.

I would not be at all surprised if the vultures have been nesting at Herrontown for years. I hope the corncrib is going to remain undisturbed for these gentle and interesting birds to continue to live in, even as your project to protect and repair the house has succeeded. Congratulations on that as well!

So, it sounds like we have some fledgling vultures at Herrontown Woods, and an additional reason to save the little barn and corncrib as part of the 1875 cottage farmstead that mathematician Oswald Veblen used as his study before giving it to the county in 1957.

The question of whether and how vultures molt is still up for grabs. And I wondered if molting birds are as down-in-the-mouth-looking as the fledgling vulture, standing there in the barn. Does a molting bird know it will soon regain the ability to fly, or might the bird, stripped of its identity, fall into an existential crisis that ends only when new feathers grow? And is that feeling anything like what people and other sentient beings will feel tomorrow, when the sun seems to molt, high above us?

Wildflowers and People Gather By the River

What a glorious day, this past Sunday, down along the canal in Princeton. Cool, sunny weather drew people to the canal, by boat, foot and bicycle. The sounds of laughter and conversation mixed with birdsong and a generous show of summer floodplain wildflowers.

Boys returned to their Huck Finn roots,

and insects, too, gathered by the river

or bathed in the sun.

Many different species of oak have long gathered along the section of the towpath between Harrison St and Washington Rd, planted back when the university viewed the canal as an ornamental entryway to campus.

Here's white oak, with it's rounded lobes,

and possibly a post oak, with its lobes arranged in the shape of a cross.

Swamp white oak and bur oak have similar leaves, swollen towards the tips, like the bison that used to forage in the oak savannas of the midwest and south, back when mildfire could play through and refresh the landscape.

Not sure what type of oak this is.

It was a day when nature seemed to be moving towards restoring balance. The overly aggressive multiflora rose was getting a humbling dose of rose rosette disease.

One Ailanthus, at least, was being slowed down by the munchings of the caterpillars of the Ailanthus webworm moth.

The adult is the orange patterned insect in this photo.

And a honeysuckle shrub was being hampered by some sort of witch's broom growth.

Queen Anne's Lace was being pretty without taking over.

Introduced knapweeds like spotted knapweed have spread very agressively in the midwest. I've been trying to believe that this Tyrol knapweed will be relatively benign as it spreads slowly along the canal. Here, at least, it's hosting a monarch.

True, the porcelainberry was having its way in one of the openings in the canopy,

and capitalizing on a tree's demise.

Stiltgrass still lines the nature path,

and a Norway maple's dense shade was stunting growth beneath it.

Mugwort framed concrete marker, but hasn't dominated along the canal like it sometimes does in gas line right of ways.

Signs at the Harrison Street crossing warned of hydrilla, an aquatic invasive plant. None of this, however, could break the upbeat mood of a cool, sunny Sunday in late July.

Flowers from earlier in the year were quickly turning into seeds, like buttonbush

silky dogwood,

common milkweed,

One of the ornamental cherries planted by the university long ago,

pokeweed,

and tall meadow rue.

Seeing native shrubs like this elderberry trying to grow along the banks of the canal, I long ago envisioned managing the banks for native shrubs that could beautify and provide abundant wildlife food. But the banks of the canal are managed independently of the towpaths, by a different agency. As with most landscape maintenance, the workers tend to be unselective in what they cut. To preserve the view from the towpath, the bank is cut every few years--not enough time for a shrub to do much flowering and fruiting that would benefit wildlife.

Not far down the lake from Washington Rd. bridge stands the stump of a sweetgum tree once darkened each day by roosting cormorants.

Its life may have been cut short by the excess guano, or its own precarious perch on the edge of the bank. Not sure where the cormorants have gone.

Another sweetgum, with its star-shaped leaves and protruding wings on the branches, was thriving elsewhere along the trail.

Some of the wildflowers have grown to giant size with the well-spaced rains this summer. These cutleaf coneflowers are ten feet high,

as are some of the ironweeds.

The cutleaf coneflowers were the first native wildflowers I spotted ten years ago along this section of the canal, which in turn led to the state park staff reducing the mowing to once a year so these wildflowers would have a change to mature and bloom

Hollow-stemmed Joe-Pye-Weed has really prospered in the open shade of the oaks. Each year there are more patches of these attractive flowers.

Goldenrods can be distinguished by the different shapes of their flowerheads. Some have elm shaped inflorescence,

others are flatter.

Each year, the rose mallow hibiscus bloom along the shore, with lizard's tail and yellow pond lillies extending out into the Carnegie Lake waters beyond them.

It would have been a perfect day to lead what usually is an annual nature walk along the towpath. For 2017, this account will have to do.

Coneflower Attracts Monarch and Much More

Typically, my random butterfly sightings don't go much beyond a tiger swallowtail fluttering in the distance. But on July 19, the purple coneflowers in the frontyard raingarden drew a diverse crowd, including this beautiful monarch. This sighting added to a few sightings elsewhere to suggest that monarchs are rebounding from a couple very tough years in which the overwintering area they occupied in the mountains of Mexico dropped to only a few acres. The blog at monarchwatch.org confirms that they are having a comparatively good year. The magnificent monarch with its matchless migration will always be vulnerable, particularly given the destabilizing effects of climate change, the loss of milkweed in farm fields now that Roundup-Ready corn and soybeans allow elimination of weeds, and the ongoing threats to the evergreen forests the monarchs congregate in every winter. There's a lot more work to do to make their population more resilient, but it's heartening to see them on the upswing.

A black tiger swallowtail in particularly good condition.

This looks to be a variegated fritillary,

with a different pattern on the underside.

A skipper,

a bumblebee, of which there are many species.

It was an oak in the backyard that attracted this moth, possibly a tulip tree beauty moth.

A few days later, we were back to the tiger swallowtail.