Visitors welcome.

by | Feb 23, 2011 | Uncategorized |

Today I had the pleasure of showing Sonja Stark of Pilot Girl Productions around the area. We had a great day, checking out otter and mink tracks on the West Branch of the Ausable River, hiking to Owen Pond, and going into High Falls Gorge. After a bite to eat we looped back via the East Branch of the Ausable and caught up with a few ice climbers on Pitchoff and still had time to ski at Cascade Ski Center before dark. She caught a few quick frames of dog-sledding on the lake as we pulled back to the Mirror Lake Inn where Sony and her mom are staying. They were headed for dinner at the Cascade Inn, then a go around the Oval and a quick toboggan ride before bed. Their own perfect day, very much inside the map.  Read more about it on Sony’s blog. Thanks to Carol Treadwell of the Ausable River Association and Sue Cameron and Kim Reilly at the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism/Lake Placid CVB for connecting...
Barred Owl

Barred Owl

by | Jan 6, 2011 | Uncategorized, Wildlife |

A friend let me know she had seen an owl every day this week, sitting in the same place along the roadside. I checked it out on the way back from an outing this morning.  It stared at me for several minutes but flew into the white pines across the street when I approached too closely.  They are beautiful birds and seem to be high in numbers this...
Scent marks

Scent marks

by | Jan 6, 2011 | Uncategorized |

This morning in Split Rock Wildforest I had the extreme pleasure of hiking with four great outdoorsmen.  We tracked a group of three coyotes for about 30 minutes, noting this very deliberate scent mark by one of them.  The story was pretty east to read.  The coyote came from one direction, scratched the snow off the ground, apparently paused to mark the soil and small branch and then headed off where it came from, as though marking a boundary line.  Both the soil and the twig gave off a distinct odor of urine. The tracks were all fresh, being set in the snow that fell yesterday over bare...

Kingbird Highway

by | Dec 31, 2010 | Uncategorized, Wildlife |

I am reading a book called Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman.  In the 1970’s, he is traveling the United States trying to set a record, to see 650 different birds in one year.  He is hitchhiking and camping and has lost 35 lbs. It’s not surprising that the subtitle is The Story of a Natural Obsession that Got a Little Out of Hand. This is the Preface: “People always called us ‘birdwatchers.’  But if we had been, there would be no story to tell. Nothing could have been simpler than ‘birdwatching.’ An activity that by name would have required nothing more than one person, alone, watching birds, any birds.  The birds rarely would have watchd the person in return: perfectly independent, birds had no reason to care about humans.  So the watching would have been one-way, and the matter would have ended there, with no ramifications. But in the early 1970’s, we were not birdwatching.  We were birding, and that made all the difference.  We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible–and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders… …This is the story about that time.  I was fortunate enough to be traveling throughout North America, in pursuit of birds, during that formative era.  It was a good time to be on the road, a good time to be very young, a good time to learn and travel and grow while we played this great new game called birding.” If only that game...