NINE

Adirondack Spring

Early July 2015

Bobolink

Now, except for the stragglers, all the birds were back that were coming back. Barn Swallows, home from Brazil, skimmed over the northern pastures. Yellow Warblers, home from the Yucatán, darted along the roadside. Bobolinks, home from Argentina, sang on the fences. The great spring migration was over.

—EDWIN WAY TEALE, North with the Spring

At 6 a.m., an American Robin sings and a Pileated Woodpecker drums in the sharp postdawn cold. I depart overcrowded Black Bear Campground, traveling southeastward toward Ottawa. I am surprised to see a Brown Thrasher—a bird of the South—fly across the road, and then a Green Heron. Barn Swallows twist and turn over an large old field, where male Bobolinks hover improbably above the tall grass. I cross a small river, labeled “Mississippi,” west of Ottawa. Both river and road cut through handsome, thick beds of pale-gray limestone before passing right through Ottawa’s crowded western suburbs. I struggle to find Route 416 toward the New York border at Ogdensburg. A couple of days earlier, I’d been on the wild northern shore of Lake Huron, but now I am in flat farming country and the suburbs of Canada’s national capital. I am in a hurry to get back to wilderness—the interior of the Adirondack Mountains.

On my reentry to the United States, I took a high bridge across the broad and deep blue Saint Lawrence River. I told the welcoming U.S. border control officer that I was an ornithologist on a field trip, and he pointed up to a pair of Ospreys nesting on a platform. From Ogdensburg, I navigated a maze of back roads toward the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, the largest tract of wild lands in the eastern United States. I’d spent twelve summers at camp in these mountains in the 1960s and ’70s, and this was my long-overdue homecoming.

There were more welcoming sights and sounds along the two-hour back-roads drive through upstate New York. I saw the Eastern Bluebirds common in the Saint Lawrence Valley. Northwest of the park, the land is rural and open and agricultural, with only the slightest rolling hills. Eastward, billowing white clouds obscured the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I passed a bearded Amish man in a hat, blue shirt, and suspenders, guiding a horse-powered wagon. Next I slowed to pass a big Amish cart loaded with firewood and pulled by two draft horses, with two adorable children in the back and a man in standing in front to drive the horses along. Crossing into the park at 10:30 a.m., I sped along the winding two-lane roads of this lake-filled, mountain-bedecked forest wilderness and passed through Lake Placid, twice host of the Winter Olympics. I turned south from the tiny community of North Elba onto Heart Lake Road, which offers one of the most picturesque mountain vistas in all the East, looking up to Indian Pass, Algonquin Peak, Mount Colden, and Mount Marcy, which together offer some of the finest mountain hiking in the Adirondacks. This was the ideal place to end my search for spring and to bag my last two breeding wood warblers.

JULY FROST

I set up my tent in the hemlock-shaded campground of the Adirondak Loj, right on tiny Heart Lake in the bosom of the High Peaks. As I worked, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet in a young Eastern Hemlock greeted me at eye level. A Blue-headed Vireo sang his syrupy song in a maple. And a female Purple Finch perched at the very pinnacle of a mature spruce.

In the afternoon, I hiked a steep and rocky trail to the summit of nearby Mount Jo, which looks over Heart Lake to the highest summits in the mountain wilderness. The half-hour climb granted a superb view of the best of the Adirondacks. Sitting atop a big, flat block of anorthosite granite, I was content to be in this spot at this time, close to the end of my cross-country adventure. Abby Katsos, an Adirondack Mountain Club intern, greeted me; she spent the days on Mount Jo to educate arriving hikers about wise treatment of the mountain summit vegetation and to answer questions about the park and its natural history. Katsos, from Pittsburgh, was interested in animal tracking. During my hour on Mount Jo, I was visited by Cedar Waxwings, a Myrtle Warbler, and a Dark-eyed Junco. Up here, the Balsam Firs were fruiting like mad, each with an abundance of erect deep-blue cones. When these cones mature and open, groups of winter finches will descend upon them, competing with Red Squirrels for the dining bonanza.

Looking south from North Elba to the Adirondack High Peaks

On my hike down to camp, I stopped at the Loj’s nature center and met Heart Lake’s three summer naturalists (what a wonderful place for them to spend the summer). Together we talked about breeding birds and speculated on where I might find a Brown Creeper—a common species that had eluded me over the three months of my journey. The naturalists knew their stuff and gave me hints on where to search.

The Adirondak Loj, owned by the Adirondack Mountain Club, serves as the club’s center of summer operations. The Loj grounds were once the site of a woodland retreat built by Henry Van Hoevenburg, who named Heart Lake and Mount Jo (the latter for his fiancée, Josephine Scofield). The original Loj burned in a forest fire in 1903, and the current, smaller structure was built in 1927. Today it provides food and lodging for hikers and campers year-round and is a beloved destination in the High Peaks region of the great park—there’s nothing quite like completing a big climb and returning to the Loj for a hearty meal and a good night’s recuperation, with Barred Owls hooting into the night.

Why is it Adirondak Loj and not Adirondack Lodge? Melvil Dewey, president of nearby Lake Placid Club, purchased the Loj from Van Hoevenburg in 1900. Dewey, an American librarian and educator and inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, was also a supporter of a shift to simplified spelling of American English words. He put his belief into practice, condensing his first name from the traditional Melville as well as eliding the c in Adirondack and transforming the dge of Lodge into a simple j. Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Andrew Carnegie created the Simplified Spelling Board, which sought to make English simpler, phonetic, and thus more palatable as a global language. Roosevelt and Dewey used this spelling in their correspondence, but it was a difficult sell to Congress and the public, and it resulted in only minor changes to our common language (e.g., plow instead of plough; honor instead of honour).

The Adirondack Mountain Club, founded in 1922, today has twenty-eight thousand members and twenty-seven chapters across New York State. The club is among the powerhouse advocacy groups fighting to preserve the wilderness values of the Adirondacks and promoting the educational value of the wilderness experience for young and old alike. The club maintains and restores hiking trails, protects and restores sensitive alpine plant communities on high summits, teaches outdoor skills, and offers guided hikes and adventures. It works closely with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to ensure far-sighted management of Adirondack Park.

July 3, my first morning in the Adirondacks, was cold enough to require gloves and wool cap at my campsite. The dawn broke with exuberant song by American Robins and Red-eyed Vireos, and I biked out to South Meadows in search of birds. The meadows sparkled under a coating of frost in the early sunlight: the very last breath of boreal spring. A Swainson’s Thrush sang from a thicket of Balsam Fir. A sapsucker drummed in the distance. A Black-capped Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Blue-headed Vireo, Ovenbird, Common Yellowthroat, and Magnolia Warbler welcomed me to the meadow.

Then I walked the trail circumnavigating Heart Lake in search of a Brown Creeper. The preceding afternoon, one Loj naturalist had pointed me to this trail as a good spot for this retiring species. I found thickets of Hobblebush, a big stand of old Sugar Maples, and a Snowshoe Hare, but no creeper. Postwalk, I stopped for a hot breakfast at the Loj, served family-style at big rustic tables, and I had great fun chatting with the mix of guests who had come from all over.

Later in the morning, I drove north to the trailhead for Pitchoff Mountain, which looks across the narrow chasm of the Cascade Lakes to the summit of Cascade Mountain. I would climb Pitchoff rather than Cascade Peak because, on this Saturday in early July, the trail up Cascade likely would be thronged with hikers wanting to bag one of the “Adirondack 46” (the forty-six peaks in the park that are over four thousand feet tall). Pitchoff, a lesser mountain, would be quieter. The climb to its summit overlook was very steep, but once there I commandeered a section of rocky ledge, with the bright sun rising above the summits. The mountaintop conifers harbored singing Nashville and Myrtle Warblers, Red-eyed Vireos, White-throated Sparrows, and, of course, Swainson’s Thrush. A surprise awaited me up here, too: a pair of Peregrine Falcons racing about through the narrow valley between the mountains. On a breathtaking fly-by, one raptor’s wings made a tearing noise as they sliced through the chilled late-spring air.

On July 4, the morning’s first birds included a Wild Turkey, a Ruffed Grouse, a sapsucker, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, and—new for the trip!—a Brown Creeper. I located the shy little bird when I heard its tinkling territorial song in a dark thicket of hemlocks.

After biking down to the Loj for the hot breakfast, I headed off to climb Mount Van Hoevenburg. The trail from South Meadows travels through an old Red Pine plantation and a large beaver swamp, and then climbs gradually up the back of the mountain, which is home to the Olympic bobsled run on its north side. From the summit ledge on the back of the mountain, which is a northern outlier, one can look south to the whole panorama of the Adirondack High Peaks, which were cloud-free this morning. On the summit, I was serenaded by a confiding Winter Wren, a Blue Jay, a White-throated Sparrow, and a Myrtle Warbler. On the hike down, I came upon several noisy sapsuckers, a Black-throated Blue Warbler (a quest bird!) in the deciduous growth, and a Mourning Warbler in the beaver swamp. The day ended with a thunderstorm, which I waited out in my car, cooking dinner late, after the rain had cleared off. I had finished reading in my tent when loud reports began to echo down the valleys from Lake Placid town: Independence Day fireworks. They seemed to go on forever. I was far enough away that I could drift off, with thoughts of my big climb planned for the following morning.

July 5 broke cool and fine. From a clearing I looked up to the MacIntyre Range and the moon above it, without a cloud anywhere. I would be headed up that way this morning. By 5 a.m., I was biking south to the trailhead for Marcy Dam. It would take me three hours to summit Algonquin Peak—at 5,115 feet, the second-highest mountain in the Adirondacks. Here I would complete my three-month journey, add my last quest bird (plus the last nonquest bird of the trip), and finish up with a live radio interview with Ray Brown on his show, Talkin’ Birds.

The wooded low country was busy with birds this morning: Swainson’s Thrushes, Ovenbirds, and Blue-headed Vireos. As I climbed the initial ridge, I found Bunchberry in fresh flower—I was retreating earlier into spring as I gained elevation. I was the first hiker on the mountain this morning. The trail was mainly sloping shield rock, with small streams coursing down the rough granite face in many places, and my hiking boots gripped it well as I moved higher and higher. I passed through a section that had been burned long ago; a nearly pure stand of aging Paper Birch was dying out and being replaced by Balsam Fir. By 7:30 a.m., I was in pure Balsam Fir, where I heard my first Blackpoll Warbler, a species I had seen in migration but whose boreal-montane breeding habitat I was now entering for the first time on the trip. It was a treat to get a close look at the black-capped, white-cheeked, yellow-legged male moving gingerly among the fir boughs, its high-pitched song—ts ts ts ts ts ts ts ts ts—barely discernible except at very close range.

Black-throated Blue Warbler

Proceeding up the mountain a few minutes later, I heard the thin, rapid musical phrases of Bicknell’s Thrush from a nearby thicket of Balsam. It was species number 259 of the hundred-day field trip, and the last bird of my journey. This mountaintop will-o’-the-wisp, rarely seen in migration, is found in summer only in the spruce-fir zone of Northeast mountains and in winter in remnant tropical upland forests of Hispaniola and Cuba. Hearing this Neotropical migrant’s reeling song is one of the treats of the Adirondack High Peaks. The singer had a black-spotted breast, olive-brown upper parts, and dark eyes, looking like a small version of the more common and widespread Swainson’s Thrush. Both of these thrush species distinguish themselves by their lovely territorial songs. The Bicknell’s upland forest wintering habitat on Hispaniola is under threat. Moreover, the many small patches of mountaintop habitat in the Northeast could lose their ability to host Bicknell’s Thrush under the growing influence of climate change. The Vermont Center for Ecostudies, through its ongoing field studies, is working to develop programs to ensure the health of both wintering and summering populations of the thrush.

As I climbed higher, the firs became more stunted. Before long I was in the open, and the vast Adirondacks spread out in all directions—forests in various shades of green, dark lakes, and mountains of varying shades of green, blue, and purple, depending on distance. I reached the high, rocky summit at 8:20 a.m., sharing the heavenly perch with only birds and alpine wildflowers. The wind blew strongly from the northwest, and a thin mist passed over the rocky dome, chilling me to the bone. I pulled out my fleece and found a sheltered rocky niche in the lee of the summit to soak up the sun while being protected from the cutting wind.

A dwarf spring garden grew here: recumbent firs and spruce, no more than a foot or two high, clung to the rocky substrate. In the openings, dwarfed flowering plants hugged the gravelly soil—False Hellebore (liberally glazed with frost), Diapensia, Mountain Sandwort, Bunchberry, and Clintonia, alongside dwarfed versions of Bog Laurel, Labrador Tea, Blueberry, Mountain-ash, and other woody plants. Everything lay low, hiding from the desiccating effect of the relentless summit wind. Here the brief alpine spring was still only arriving, soon to be followed by a short summer before the advent of the long autumn and winter. I had finished my journey in a high place where spring arrives in early July, a hundred days after my start in the Deep South.

As I rested and let the sun hit my face, I heard the tinkling trill of a snowbird—a Dark-eyed Junco, singing from a perch in a dwarf Balsam Fir. A minute later a raven soared overhead and gave a single low croak, his wings grabbing the stiff breeze. A Myrtle Warbler, one of the migrant songbirds I’d followed from Texas up the Mississippi and into Ontario and New York, gave its sad, musical, rambling trill from the thick carpet of firs downslope, reminding me of my first climb of this very peak in July 1965, when I was thirteen years old: a half century ago.

LAST OF THE BREEDING WARBLERS

After three months of effort, I had seen all the East’s breeding wood warblers on their breeding habitat, from Louisiana to Minnesota and from Ontario to the Adirondacks. The last two species (Black-throated Blue and Blackpoll Warblers) had drawn me back here to the mountains, and in many ways both are iconic wood warblers—well known, beloved, and widespread. They breed in the North Woods, wintering in the Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America.

The Black-throated Blue Warbler (quest bird number 36) is a favorite of many birders. It is a common breeder in mature mixed forests of the Adirondacks. There are few more handsome birds; the male is simply but elegantly plumed in slate blue, black, and white. It forages in the understory, so it is visible at eye level, and the male’s buzzy song, zeeoah zeeoh zeee?, alerts the birder to its presence. The bird is among the easiest wood warblers to track down in the forest. It is an eastern species, breeding in the Appalachians and upland New England, but is essentially absent as a breeder from the Mississippi drainage. That’s why I was seeing it on its breeding habitat for the first time here; in fact, I had first seen the bird on its breeding grounds in the central Adirondacks back in 1965.

The Blackpoll Warbler, a widespread migrant and the last of my quest warblers, prefers mountain summits of balsam fir as a nesting habitat. That’s why I had climbed Algonquin Peak, whose upper slopes are a sure place to find the bird on its late-spring breeding territory. The Blackpoll traditionally has swept through the woods of the East Coast on its way north, its passage announcing the end of spring migration. It holds all sorts of memories for those who love warblers, yet sadly, in the past two decades, its numbers have declined substantially. I recall encountering thirty or more on a spring morning in Washington, D.C., but now I rarely hear or see more than one or two in a day. It is alarming when a commonplace species becomes scarce. What has gone wrong?

THE ADIRONDACKS—THEN AND NOW

What I saw in my five days in the Adirondacks reminded me of what I recalled from the 1960s and 1970s. I was unable to detect major changes to the wild lands or the built environment; I visited the towns of Tupper Lake, Saranac Lake, and Lake Placid, and all were still picturesque, compact, and pleasingly old-fashioned. Perhaps this is not surprising, as the population of the Adirondacks has increased very little since 1900. At that time, it was 100,000, and in the year 2000, it was still only 130,000. The Adirondack Park Agency (APA), created in 1971, has successfully prevented the overdevelopment of this great forest reserve. The goal of the APA is to balance environmental concerns with economic development, and thus there has been concentrated development in centers of tourism (such as Old Forge and Lake Placid) while increasing amounts of wild land has been bought by the state and placed under strict protection. Again a comparison: in 1900, there were 1.2 million acres of state-owned land. This number had nearly tripled by the year 2000, while the number of sawmills in the park dropped by 50 percent in the same period.

Still, some negative trends are apparent, such as the advent of acid rain and climate change. The former is caused by sulfuric and nitric acids produced by the combustion of fossil fuels (sulfur from coal, nitrogen from coal and gasoline). These pollutants from power plants, industries, and automobiles travel hundreds of miles from their sources and fall with rain into the lakes and high-elevation conifer forests of the Adirondacks. With its high levels of precipitation, impermeable bedrock, and relatively high elevations, the Adirondack region has been particularly vulnerable to acid rain, which releases aluminum from soils. The aluminum and the acid itself kill fish and other aquatic species. Luckily, the Clean Air Act has reduced the impact of acid rain over the last decade or so. As a result, the population of an iconic Adirondack bird—the Common Loon—has rebounded to healthy levels. I did not see evidence of acid rain in my hike up Algonquin, but it historically has damaged conifers on certain summit forests and impacted lake fisheries. There has been progress, but this is a long-term phenomenon, requiring a long-term solution. Our government should not give up on the fight for cleaner air and cleaner water.

Climate change, too, is impacting the Adirondacks. I did not notice its effects in my visit, but it has had impacts on the birdlife. For instance, two of the specialty boreal bird species I encountered in northern Ontario, the Spruce Grouse and the American Three-toed Woodpecker, have, since the 1960s, declined to the point of disappearance in the Adirondacks. Most experts assume the demise of the local breeding populations of the two species is the result of climate change. Just what physical or biotic stressors are harming these two special birds is unknown, but the declines appear real.

Changes in the area’s winter birdlife have been well documented in a paper by Larry Master that analyzes the results of the Christmas Bird Count over a sixty-year period in the central Adirondacks. More than a dozen bird species absent from early counts have become commonplace in more recent counts, including the Canada Goose, Hooded Merganser, Common Merganser, and Great Blue Heron—all of which require open water for foraging. Now Adirondack lakes freeze later in the autumn and melt sooner in the spring. Today the Adirondacks see much reduced snowfall and many fewer severely cold winter days than they did fifty years ago.

So, acid rain and fewer cold and snowy winters are serious changes in the Adirondacks. How these ongoing chemical and meteorological changes shall further alter the region is unknown, but additional biotic impacts may show themselves in decades to come. The world is changing, and our favorite places will change with it.

TROPICS BOUND

The last stage of this story of migrant songbirds takes place here in the Adirondacks. The warblers and vireos that nest in June and early July find themselves in a holiday feasting period in late July and August and into September. During this time, adults and hatching-year birds seem to follow distinct courses, though only pieces of this story have been delineated. Adults search out productive staging areas where they can forage on rich food resources, and probably young birds do the same thing, though apparently not in the same locations. The two age groups also appear to take different pathways to their winter homes in the Tropics. Both groups do seem to drift eastward in the last weeks of summer, heading toward New England, but long-term bird-banding operations in New England show that adult songbirds tend to concentrate in rich interior forest areas, while young birds tend to end up on the coast. Recall that older birds have experience with this southbound trip, whereas younger ones do not and so must follow instinctual impulses.

We do know that two of our focal species, the Connecticut and the Blackpoll Warblers, carry out a remarkable southbound journey as adults. Both species move east from their breeding habitat to the coast of New England (Blackpoll) or the Mid-Atlantic (Connecticut) and then depart southeastward out over the ocean, making a nonstop flight to the northern coast of South America. Some small number of individuals of both species touch down in Bermuda, which is on the flight path southward. The hardiest individuals that make the whole overwater trip fly nearly two thousand miles—a flight that might take as much as eighty hours. This heroic journey requires incredible reserves of energy, which is why the birds spend weeks bulking up in the interior of New England in early autumn before they make the flight. The Blackpoll has been shown to double its weight prior to departure from New England so that it will have the necessary energy stores for its trip. Earlier in this book, I discussed migrant songbirds’ northbound flights across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet even those flights pale in comparison to this autumn trek to South America. It is the most amazing feat of any Neotropical songbird migrant that we know of to date—the mind-boggling end product of the process of organic evolution operating on tiny songbirds over tens of thousands of generations.