Been a slow summer. It feels like there has been nothing going on but in fact we've had some good showing. One was a Mississippi kite out in the county. Unfortunately, as best I know, there was no follow up sighting. A second sighting was today but I don't where along Charlie Carson Road it occurred. The second was a Anhinga seen and photographed upstream from Winged Deer Park on Boone Lake. That one caused some excitement. There was a second sighting in Johnson County. If I am not mistaken this was a first! Fall Naturalist Rally at Roan Mountain is September 11. Check either the park's schedule or start with the Friends of Roan Mountain facebook site. After that we swing into the Fall count. This ought to be about year 77 or so. The Lee and Lois Herndon Chapter of TOS has been in business a long time. Search for Elizabehton Bird Club if you are interested. We field a whole gang of bird watchers who make the day interesting. After this the annual trip to the coast. This time its four days (one down, two and a half there, one back) to the Georgia Coast below Savannah. Good birding country and about as foreign to upper East Tennessee as is Yellowstone or Maine. Don't have Joe McGuiness' email handy so check the club page or contact me at CFM46@MOUNET.COM. ###

Cicada

The cicada are out in force (and in the forest) in upper East Tennessee. I’ve not heard any in Johnson City proper but just down the road from my house one population was in full throat. I meandered around Pilot Hill the other morning and they were singing in full throat across the road in the Philadelphia Community cemetery. I heard several more broods along the drive back to town. The last time would have 2004 (?) and I think I paid attention then when I was visiting the Amish Country store down on Rt. 107 with my friend Butch Farr. Before that would have 1987 and I still new to the territory and probably not yet attuned to such things. I can’t imagine trying to encapsulate my life in 17-year leaps. I can well imagine anyone who has this phenomenon in their backyard might get a little tired of it. One survey indicated there were 1.5-million cicada per acre. Don’t know if it was an acre of trees or just a mixture of grass and trees. I own one-half acre but half of that is the house. A potential 375,000 of these critters in my backyard? I’d be staying in a hotel by now. ###

Second Round to Hampton Creek Cove

A second trip in recent memory to Hampton Creek Cove, outside the town of the Roan Mountain, Tennessee, was slightly different from the first. As you’d expect, a few more trees were blooming and some ground cover was starting to shake off winter. But it is a far cry from looking like spring here at 1500 feet lower elevation. Which is okay! I like it all. But, for the most part, not much change in the greenery from one time to next. I did meet up with 3 sets of couples exploring the cove. Mostly you follow a farm track as far as you want, up hill. At the second bridge you can try to cross here and go around to the left or continue up through the pasture to the right. At the very end of the pasture is a crawl-through gate and then the trail continues on up, very much up, to Yellow Mountain Gap on the AT. You can see it from here but getting there might be a different battle. The creek is of course a lesson in water. What makes the Appalachians important for the east is their role as the beginning of all our water. As much as it rains here in Johnson City (which seems like it rains a lot) it rains more in the higher elevations. All that water goes one of two directions. To the east and directly to the Atlantic or via Chesapeake Bay. Or westerly, generally from below Pittsburgh, via the Ohio River watershed. North of Pittsburgh the westerly flow is to the great lakes. There is a great lesson in watershed geography along the Eastern Continental Divide which I feel is not often discussed. The NortherAmerican Continental Divide gets all the ink. A distinct watershed, our region of the southeastern mountains, runs from northeastern Alabama and northwestern Alabama to Mobile Bay. But, if you want water and you live far downstream from Carter County, Tenn., then you have to a bridge here and there, too. The cove has several foot bridges none of which I trust enough to try. This limits your route. Tractors don’t mind getting their feet wet. I do mind, however! These bridges are not new nor metal but logs and planks. And they tilt and they get slick. I’ll take an alternate route. Still there is a lot to see and enjoy. It is for sure a pretty place and very much away from the crowds of hikers at Carver’s Gap and Roan Mountain State Park. My next personal goal might be to get through the crawl-through gate and on further up the trail into the trees. As long as these old legs can manage it. ###

Tree Planting at Jacob's

I was finally out and about in the woods and parks despite the unrelenting COVID. The woods are safe. Several of us joined in planting trees at Jacob’s Nature Park on Sinking Creek in Johnson City. We’d had rain the day before and now rain again in the forecast for the afternoon. The group was an assortment of volunteers from a local company, state forestry people, and one or two ordinary volunteers, like me, all masked. Jacob’s Nature Park is a small park that is bisected by Sinking Creek of which you are warned to avoid the waters. It is a very nice little park and lots of fun if you like taking walks focusing on the trees and flowers. At one entrance is a pavilion with a live roof where we met to get organized and started, hopefully before it rained. Mostly we worked in twos and threes but really scurried to finish up. I was told later that we planted 60 trees in an amazingly short period of time. I know i was a muddy mess and already sore but it was fun. Until the first lightning bolt and rumble of thunder. At the shelter, we gathered for a communal “thank you” the majority of the group headed for the cars since this not a threat of a storm. Those of us that stayed were entertained with a very strange natural treat. A hailstorm. Generally you don’t want to be out in a hailstorm but the shelter was big enough that we were protected. But, a hailstorm is a fascinating. I don’t remember how many years it’s been since I have seen hail. And my impression was some of our group had never been so close to a hailstorm. When you’re standing under an open shelter, that’s as close as I want to be to a hailstorm. But these things move on and probably 15 minutes later the hail stopped, the rain let up, and not soon after that the morning became just an ordinary rain-soaked spring day. ###

Keepin' It Local

Birding in northeast Tennessee has hardly stopped. But organized field trips have pretty much gone away and each of us is left to our own habits. Mine is generally what I can see around the neighborhood. Or hear. I have had for three summers a red-winged hawk screaming about this same time of the summer which leads me to think in terms of a family being raised and taught to fly and hunt. Or my summer’s usual replay of a screech owl from probably my backyard but I’ve never looked much to find him. I like to listen.

There are places to visit (also mostly available on e-birds if you are inclined): Jacob’s Nature Park on King Springs road in Johnson City if the newest and fairly hot spot. Osceola Island downstream from TVA’s South Holston Dam is refreshing. The tail waters of Boone Dam at low water is a cinch for GBH and cormorant.

Two really underutilized spots are Steele Creek Park along the south side of Bristol, Tenn. Admission is required but the lake and walks are very relaxing and sometimes surprisingly productive. Also, White Top Creek Park across from Bristol Motor Speedway. A new park that was carved out of the BMS parking spaces that has a nice walk but you should start birding when you pull off the highway rather than wait. The surrounding terraced parking areas for the track should not be ignored! The best birding is usually along the back side of the park near White Top Creek.

Johnson City parks are iffy. Winged Deer is on again off again. Willow Springs seems to have gotten quiet. But, as always, give it try! We’ve had gulls and terns show up around the county.
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Mid-April birding

In Johnson City, there are a couple of good spots to bird watch. Be sure to take your mask, however. And most of the more active places are already on e-birds. We are also lucky that living on the edge of slopes of the southern Appalachians and near a couple of TVA lakes, we can get to or have come our way a good variety off birds over the course of the year. Check your e-birds for Washington County, Tennessee.

Some of the places: Boone Lake Dam, Davis Dock (near Beaver Creek on Boone Lake), Jacob’s Creek (on King Springs Road in the southern part of town almost in Carter County), Winged Deer Park, Buffalo Mountain Park, Cherokee National Forest (south side of Washington County), Osceola Island (or Weir Dam, they are the same place, in Sullivan County at South Holston Dam). Access will remain iffy for the time being.

Boone Lake is still down but you can work the shoreline from many places. The city parks are hit and miss but early mornings are pretty good. Winged Deer offers probably a better variety (best is weekday mornings). Buffalo Mountain has the better hiking. Jacob’s Creek has the most fun bridges, if you like that sort of thing!

Use Google-maps to find many of these and their access roads. It’s a beautiful time of the year to be out in the county. The birds pretty much ignore the coronavirus.

And then you get kind of lucky, too. Out taking my “essential” walk around the Liberty Bell Complex (Science Hill High School and Liberty Bell Junior High School on Roan Street), at the drain pond between SCHS’s parking lot and the Skate Park, I had a green heron, solitary sandpiper, and a female mallard with chicks. The mallard family drew the most attention if only because the heron was still as a stone and looked a lot like the accumulated vegetation trash it was standing on. The next day I tried this route again with high expectations: nothing.

Last year, one of our members spied a gaggle of great egret on the pond. Most of the time it’s kind of empty.

Days before posting this club members spied a sandhill crane in the parking lot at one of our grocery stores. It seemed very unconcerned at traffic and asphalt. The stranger part might be is that my photo was taken about 6:00 p.m. and it had first been reported along about 9:00 a.m.
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Spring Birding amongst the mayhem

Here we are in the midst of this quarantined times and the birds just keep on coming into the landscape. Bird counts and club meetings are going to be delicately planned if possible at all.

Group outings are on the forbidden list, as they should be. Four people in a car is a problem waiting to happen.

But, spring has arrived, if you can think of it substantially different from winter which was probably a warm one for us. Negligible snow. Hardly got below freezing air temperatures. The non-winter might cause us a very buggy summer.

I load my sunflower feeder pretty regularly even with all the flowers and plants starting to bloom. The one bag of thistle got demolished by the finches. Once they start it becomes a crowd. I think they even chased off a squirrel. But thistle bags are expensive and the older the bag, if you’re using refills, the more stained it gets. Don’t know if the stain is a problem.

So far the customer base at the feeding is routine: cardinal, house/purple finch, titmouse, white breasted nut-hatch, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, chickadee, towhee, mourning doves (on the ground below) and robins out in the yard. A mockingbird has discovered my suet feeder but the woodpeckers have not.

The Johnson City city parks are “accessible” and with the weather starting to change the bird watching ought to pick up. Winged Deer Park has some waterfowl although they are usually confined to Canada geese and Mallard. Birding across the road from the river in the wooded park(and doing about anything else there) is best in the mornings during the week. Winged Deer gets lots of bicycle traffic in the woods during the weekends. Jacob’s Creek on King Springs Road is very small but a variety of birds show up. I haven’t made it to Buffalo Mountain nor Willow Springs in a while so no reports there. Roan Mountain State Park is accessible but the bathrooms are closed. Just be careful about being in groups.

Under the new rules of safer-at-home in Tennessee and Johnson City just be advised to know those rules and be prepared.

Likewise, Boone Lake dam and Fort Patrick Henry dam, in Kingsport, are good birding spots. Big Springs Road along the South Holston River upstream from Bluff City is always good. And easy to get to.

The eagles have chicks but this year’s fledge I think is uneven compared to last year’s. You can always check the eagle-cam at East Tennessee State University’s home page (www.etsu.edu).
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