New Year's Day in the Pines

with peckerwoods and carnivorous plants

In Japan, “forest bathing” is considered essential to mental health, but when I walk in the woods naked, I get arrested.

(And ticks.)

The forest replenishes me. As I said a few days ago, when I drove to Apple Pie Hill on New Year’s Day, I felt joy as soon as my car was surrounded by trees. Before I even left county road 532 onto the fire roads, before I smelled the pines and was enveloped by their silence. Get outside in the winter! I went for a walk at the local park today and it was only a couple of degrees above freezing, and I had to tolerate the crap music pumped through loudspeakers to keep people from sleeping on the benches, but it lifted my chilly spirits.

Not as much as the forest, mind you. Black Run Preserve and Camden County Trails are my go-to for mountain biking, and I know them very well by now. They still make me happy to visit, no matter how familiar. When I need a pick-me-up, I’ll make a detour to the van in the woods at CCC, or Aerohaven at Black Run, with its feisty prickly pear cactuses breaking through the ancient asphalt. Nature swallowing up manmade things always makes me smile.

To slow myself down a bit, I bought a camera. Remember a few weeks ago, when I decided to go for a hike instead of a bike ride, and I met the molting rat snake? Well, that inspired me to take more nature photography. Because I do not like fiddling with all sorts of devices and lenses, I bought the absolute largest point and shoot camera made, the Sony Cyber-shot RX10-IV, with a 24mm-600mm zoom lens. It even lets a goon like me take halfway decent photos. Here’s house finches in my yard, a cardinal at Saddler’s Woods, and a northern flicker at Timber Creek:

I wasn’t really into birds until I bought a house, and northern flickers started feeding in the trees around the yard. I’d never seen one before, and they are one of three kinds of woodpeckers in this area. (The other two are downy and red-bellied woodpeckers.) One of my favorite things about these birds is that they sound like Woody Woodpecker. They really do sound like machine-gun laughter. And little downy woodpeckers have a sassiness belied by their size. I saw a pileated, the iconic big redhead of the bunch, in the heart of the pandemic when I was hiking every trail near home. It was high in the tree, but its silhouette was unmistakable.

One of my ironic lifer birds was the yellow-bellied sapsucker, and I saw one in Cape May at the now-abandoned Audubon Society Bird Observatory. I say ironic because I only wanted to see one because of the silly name that was a comedic shibboleth in Looney Tunes cartoons and other pop culture mainstays of my youth. My favorite funny bird names are yellow-billed oxpecker and white-breasted nuthatch, both of which serve as fine exclamations and insults for any occasion when profanity is unwanted or unwise. (I’ve known quite a few white-breasted nuthatches in my day, and I’ve behaved perfectly like a yellow-billed oxpecker more times than I care to count.)¹

The birds are scarce but not all departed. On Christmas Day, I caught a hawk of some sort having a nosh on a chunk of bloody roadkill as I left the reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware; swamp sparrows and mute swans were abundant at Franklin Parker Preserve, where I saw carnivorous pitcher plants up close. Here are the plants next to a charred pine tree, the bog in which they live, and my bike near the defunct cranberry bogs where the sparrows sang.

I went for a ride here after climbing the fire tower. The tower used to be open to the public, but vandals ruined that for everyone by throwing old televisions from it. Now the Department of Environmental Protection allows you to climb it on certain days. It is worth the wait, as at 200 feet above sea level, the hill is the highest point in the southern New Jersey intercoastal plain. The tower itself is another hundred or so feet above that, over the oldest pines, and you can see Atlantic City and Philadelphia from it on a clear day. It was clear enough for us to see AC, but only a misty spot where the City of Brotherly Love resides. Not bad for a gray day.

What struck me up there was the silence. The Pines are always quieter than you expect, living up to the “barren” in their name. Hardy plants and wildlife abound there, including birds, but never as many as you expect. I’ve heard more tree frogs than birds in my explorations, and the bird I heard the most was a whippoorwill who liked to sing from ten at night until five in the morning, the only time I’ve camped in the Pine Barrens. (Earplugs were a lifesaver.)

Here’s the tower and a view from up top.

A few good reads, before I leave you. Chris La Tray, on winter and the end of the year:

“For all the talk of it, how many of us are actually allowed to slow down anyway?”

Taking Bold Action

An interview with Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future, which I’ll be reading soon. Ryan Blakeley’s newsletter is new to me, but this made me subscribe.

Are roads the biggest driver of ecological destruction? An interview with Ben Goldfarb

I have named the new bike! The Surly Ice Cream Truck, which itself is a name that’s hard to beat, is now dubbed The Sweaty Yeti. That’s the name of a fat bike race in Wisconsin, which I’ll probably never attend, but I do hope to ride in snow someday. There were big fat flakes coming down as I rode at Black Run today, but nothing stuck. My friend Johnny calls me The Temperate Yeti because I am a big hairy ape, so the name fits. The second photo is my car parked on Apple Pie Hill.

And here are a few videos from the trail. The first is from a run through Camden County College’s trails, which have been well carved into a fun place to ride:

And this one is riding with the Outdoors Club of South Jersey at Black Run. Watch closely and you get to see me crash in the sand! I was riding “the Gorn,” my Trek Marlin, to keep up with the faster riders, and I took a bad turn in the sand. Thanks to years of grappling, I rolled with the bike instead of face planting, and I was back on the trail in a few seconds. I’d just never done it with a bike before.

Next time: Haruki Murakami, Saltburn, and the mellow moods of Mogwai.

1. Peckerwood is always a good insult, as well.