FreeLists / bristol-birds / [Bristol-Birds] BBC Trip: More Sapsuckers & Orchids !!!

["Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Eleven members of the Bristol Bird Club stood in a parking lot at Sugar Grove, 
Va. this afternoon (Sat. 6/19).  All were tired.  It was time to head home.  
Everyone continued to talk quietly about how good the birding day had been.  
How much we enjoyed being together.  How it couldn't have been more perfect !
All morning Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers came out of the woods for us.   This very 
difficult-to-find woodpecker, living sparsley in spotted locals amongst this 
beautiful Blue Ridge mountain chain.  They entertained us nearly everywhere we 
looked in these higher elevations of the Jefferson National Forest's Mount 
Rogers National Recreation Area.

They were laced here and there by several timely-blooming orchids of two 
fascinating Appalachian species.  Here are special plants huddled and sheltered 
beneath the tall canopy.  Some were gently leaning into patches of sunlight and 
yet others showed their beauty along tiny trickling watercourses that meandered 
down to Fox Creek and the not too distant and ancient New River.

We saw six (6) sapsuckers along the four-mile length of the 'Possum Creek jeep 
trail on the northwest face of Stone Mountain up to the "Scales" at 4,400 feet 
elevation at the Appalachian Trail and Pine Mountain.   

Five of those birds were at two new breeding territories Ron Harrington and 
Wallace Coffey had not found yesterday.   Friday's birds were above 4,000 feet 
and the BBC field trip birds today were below 4,000, except for one.  We have 
now found five territories along this route in two days.  Checking all the 
sites by gender of birds for the two days, we have found eight (8) sapsuckers 
along this road.  The elevations of the territories range from 3,860 feet to 
4,300 feet. 

We left our last cars behind in Abingdon and went the distance loaded all in 
the 4-wheel drives members brought  -- no more than three birders in any one.  
Very comfortable and most convient.

Mike Poe was our audio tech and delivered extremely effective calls.  Dexter 
Newman took about 40 digital photos of several sapsuckers, using his 
professional power lens and high quality camera equipment at sometimes 
amazingly close range.

Harrington skillfully guided us from plaed to place and charted the sapsuckers 
on his topo maps.  Coffey tracked the elevation with his altimeter, wrote field 
notes and kept everyone up to snuff on Harrington's family history, old high 
school and family graveyard.  Janice Martin measured the stops and mileage.  
John Hay marked sapsucker sites with tape for further checking. 

Don Holt kept the trip list   Mike Evans, Janice Martin, Harrington and Newman 
drove 4-wheels.  Everyone helped direct traffic as we passed other vehicles and 
when group after group of horses trudged past us, heading into the high country.

Fred Martin,  just this week released from the the hospital after days of being 
treated for and recovering from a stroke, made it the entire way and worked as 
hard as anyone. It was amazing watching him lean on his crutches in the road as 
he found and pointed out both sapsuckers and wild orchids for the rest of us to 
experience.  Several cameras and tripods helped record the events and sights of 
the day. 

Mary Evans and Don Holt knew those orchids!  They backed it up by putting Stan 
Bentley's neat book on Appalachian orchids to work.  Bob Quillen found orchids 
well out into the woods and mushrooms along the road and under foot.  What a 
show we enjoyed !  

It took us two hours to crawl the 4-wheelers and birders to the Scales area at 
Pine Mountain in the high country.  A fun share of that was a very mad male 
Canada Warbler who just simply was righteous over Poe's MP3 player calls.  It 
wouldn't leave and nearly became a pest ;-)    It flew around us, even getting 
out in the opening and singing until we had to ask it to leave.  Newman took 
many photographs but that didn't make things any better.  It didn't leave and 
four hours later was still there as we drove back down. 

Janice and Fred Martin were thrilled with the 4-wheeling in their 
recently-purchased vehicle.

Don and Mary were convinced two patches of near lilac-colored fringed orchids 
growing along the little watercourse and in an open sun-spotted forest floor 
were the Small Purple Fringed Orchid.  Many other of these plants have yet to 
bloom.  The floresence on one tall attractive plant was 6 inches and the plant 
itself reached 20 inches.  Several of the Round Leafed Orchids with their 
losely spaced white flowers were seen at one station.  All offered a delight to 
Mike Poe and Dexter Newman who couldn't pull their cameras away, once they 
began to capture the orchid's beauty.

At the Scales we shared the spacious grassy parking area by visiting with a 
Lexington, KY family who were hiking and camping with a collie and two small 
daughters.  The girls loved the attention and the dog all the peting.  Horses 
were coming and going along the horizon on the famous Virginia Highlands Horse 
Trail.  Short strings of AT hikers passed, heading up slopes into the sky.  
Along the mountain route horseback riders reported being trail groups from 
South Carolina,  High Point, NC., Mountain City, TN, West Virginia, and one 
included a zoo worker from Western Carolina.  The riders were all ages.  Many 
teenagers and a few very young riders convincingly mounted and in control.

A large group of  young people from Asheville, NC had been hiking and camping.  
They were playing a game of whiffleball at the Scales.  Later they came to us 
as a group and asked us to take their group photo.  We did and they returned 
the favor by making our group photo.  Of course Don Holt was well up the 
mountain in the field calling back on his radio about finding Cinnamon Ferns.  
He missed our group picture :-(   Mike Evans offered to "paste him in."  
(Photo:   
http://f2.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jwcoffeyy/detail?.dir=/efd5&.dnm=a359.jpg )

For those of you who didn't make it, of course this sounds like "music that 
would be a brass band."  Just ask anyone there if a sentence in this report is 
bull !

We rested an hour at the Scales and had refreshments and sandwiches.  Then we 
looked across the mountains on to Homestead Road in the headwaters of Comers 
Creek in Grayson County and decided to go over that ridge down into Smyth 
County and the Hurricane Branch area.  We did and we visited the disjunct and 
very low elevation nesting site of the Golden-crowned Kinglets.  It has been 
active this year and last.  They are nesting in an old Forest Service planted 
row of tall Red Spruce which were set out many years ago for a road screen at a 
wildlife opening.

An amazing thing happened shortly before thunder rumbled in the west.  Mike Poe 
looked down in the tall grass out in the wildlife clearing and spotted Ron 
Harrington's perscription glasses which had been lost somewhere on a field trip 
in mid-May.  We stood in the road and gave Mike a round of applause.  Ron was 
thankful.  He had always maintained they had been lost there while he laid on 
his back to watch a pair of kinglets carrying food in and about the nest.

We left in a rainfall and closed the day with a touch of ecotourism as we 
pulled eleven chairs around a meal together at the Sugar Grove Diner.  Owner 
Peggy Sexton had been told Friday that we were probably coming.  She came to 
our table to pat us on the back, shake hands and say thanks for the business 
and acknowledge that our birders were stopping to eat with her.  She was all 
smiles.  What hospitality !

The amazing spasuckers would sometime come right down in our laps.  At one stop 
we had two females and a male "bickering."    

Birds for the 4-wheeling trail and vicintiy:

Turkey Vulture
Mourning Dove
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Acadian Flycatcher
Least Flycatcher
Eastern Wood-Pewee
Barn Swallow
American Crow
Common Raven
American Robin
Veery
Gray Catbird
Northern Mockingbird
Cedar Waxwing
Blue-headed Vireo
Red-eyed Vireo
Ovenbird
Black-thraoted Blue Warbler
Black-throated Green Warbler
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Hooded Warbler
Indigo Bunting
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Field Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Eastern Towehee



















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