Nature Nerd

Among some of my friends, I have a reputation for being a bit of a nature nerd. In winter, I scan ski trails for animal tracks from the chairlift. I can’t travel a back road without peering at tree hollows and fields to see what animals might be hiding or foraging there. On walks through the woods, I’m easily distracted by wildflowers, weird lichen, and scat.

So it was a joy last week to wander a swath of forest with my colleagues from the nonprofit organization where I work, whose mission is, in part, to foster an understanding of and appreciation for the natural wonders of forests. It was a happy gathering of nature nerds – made even more so, perhaps, by the cool spring sunshine and because this was the first time we’d all been together in over a year.

As children, we have with an innate sense of curiosity about the world around us. Why is the sky blue? Where did that word come from? How do birds fly? What do worms eat? Why do stars sparkle? I remember being inundated by Whats and Whys and Hows when my kids were little. And then, at some point, that curiosity – at least for many of us – subsides as we become more occupied with school and jobs and sports and social activities.

For me, this curiosity waned for a while, but returned well into adulthood. I think it was sparked when my children started asking so many questions, inspiring me to seek at least some of the answers. My now teenaged and almost-teenaged children still ask questions, if not so frequently. But when it comes to the natural world, I’m the one who drives them nuts, asking questions and stopping to take photos of both familiar and unknown discoveries. No matter how many birds I learn to identify, how many wildflowers I can name, or how many intriguing animal habits I read about or observe, there is always so much more to learn.

Years ago, I attended a nature writing conference in northern Vermont, where I joined the early morning birding walks. I knew next to nothing about birds, couldn’t identify much more than a chickadee and a robin. One morning I was walking along a dirt road with the program director, Dave, when the guide pointed out some species I no longer recall. I said something like, “That little thing?” Dave chuckled and suggested I might try to seem a bit more impressed if I found myself near more serious birders.

Now, when I see a bird in the yard I can’t identify, I zoom in as far as my little camera will allow and snap a photo so I can compare it to my field guides and check the Cornell Lab’s incredible All About Birds website. If I’m still stuck, I send the photo to my Northern Woodlands colleague Dan, who will tell me if I’m guessing correctly or, if not, what important features I’ve missed on the path to bird ID.

Gradually, the number of birds I can identify – by sight or song – has grown, though I’m still no birding expert. (I think I will forever be befuddled by woodpeckers.)

Some of what I’ve learned – about birds and bugs and flowers and mammals and trees – is through personal observation and education. Other things I’ve picked up through researching some story or another that I’m writing. Much of it I’ve gleaned from reading and editing the work of writers who are introducing me – and many other readers – to aspects of the world around us I’d never known, or even thought to wonder about.

During our walk last week, we meandered among oak and ash and hemlock trees, past rock ledges where bobcats and porcupines and turkey vultures and many other creatures roam. We found myriad wildflowers scattered across the forest floor, tucked into crevices or growing tall through the leaf litter. Wood ducks took flight from a vernal pool as we neared, and we heard a yellow-bellied sapsucker rat-a-tat-tatting at a tree – and found lots of places where sapsuckers had tapped rows of perfect, tiny holes into bark.

On this walk, I was not the only one stopping and stooping to inspect scat or snap photographs of familiar flowers – or of unfamiliar ones to look up later. And often, when I had a question, someone else in our little posse knew the answer. It was a pleasant way to spend part of the day – fostering our own understanding of and appreciation for the natural world. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's April 29, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

The Apple Path

When our children were small, my husband began mowing paths through our field, grassy lanes that allowed little legs to maneuver more easily through the landscape of home. We still mow the paths – one up around the front field, another down to Big Rock, and “Auntie EB’s Path” toward my sister-in-law’s house. The one that gets the most use, though, is the Apple Path.

This one wends between what were, perhaps, once neat rows of apple trees. Long untended, the trees now are in various stages of wildness. Some have fallen over in recent years, their old trunks twisted and gnarled. Others, left unpruned for too long, have grown unruly, like wild-haired beasts, with shoots flying upward from branches at all angles and varying heights.

Some years ago, as winter merged to spring, I made an attempt to prune a few of the trees, cutting off new shoots and sawing away tired old branches. I vowed to get to each tree – nearly three dozen in total through the front field and the back one – over the course of a year or two. But it was hard work after so many years of neglect; I was indecisive in which limbs to prune and which to keep. And so the orchard remains mostly wild.

While some of the trees are gangly and awkward, others are tall and full – vastly larger than the neatly, purposefully trimmed trees of commercial orchards. Those trees are tended to optimize fruit production. Ours are simply a familiar part of the topography now, changing just as the other wild trees – the maples and pines and birches – growing, breaking, altering their shape through the course of weather and nature.

The woman we bought the house from told us these were Prohibition trees, planted to grow fruit for making hard cider. The house was built in 1929 – near the tail end of Prohibition – and I wonder if the trees were here before the house, tended by some thirsty farmer down the road.

Whenever it was planted, and despite our neglect of the trees, we have watched many seasons shift through the old orchard.

In mid-spring, the trees transition from bare, twisted limbs to a glorious display of pastel blooms. At first, the small, tightly-whorled buds of palest pink appear, then a few blossoms unfold here and there, until suddenly the field explodes into a sweet-smelling froth of white and pink flowers. The bees buzz through the apple trees then, happily seeking the nectar there.

By the time the flowers have gone, the landscape around the apple trees has greened toward summer, and our attention shifts to other things. But come fall, the apple trees stand out again – no so much for their foliage, which, frankly, is rather blah, but for the abundance they hold.

Some of the trees have red fruit, others yellow. The apples don’t grow large, and they tend to be spotted, but they are ample in number. Some years – mostly when the kids were little and unencumbered by homework and soccer practice – we have gathered enough to make cider (not the hard kind) and apple sauce.

Mostly, though, our apple trees feed the wildlife. We have seen – either in live time or through images captured by the game camera – an array of animals traveling the Apple Path: turkeys, bears, deer, foxes, porcupines, coyotes, squirrels, crows. This year, there is a distinct, well-trodden trail pressed into the grass along the length of the Apple Path, leading from the densest cluster of apple trees down to the forest beyond our field.

The game cam is on the fritz, so I can’t know for sure who has made the trail. But I suspect the regular travelers include the mother bear and three cubs we saw often through the summer, the cubs growing from tiny, black fuzz balls to what I imagine is teenage-hood for bears – which likely means those cubs are constantly hungry now.

Several years ago, when my own cubs were still tiny, we had a mother bear with four cubs in the neighborhood. When we inadvertently startled them one evening, she sent all four up a lanky apple tree just behind the vegetable garden. While they peered out from the branches, she remained calmly on the ground below, noshing on windfall apples.

Now, in the thick of autumn, many of this year's apples have fallen to the ground. Past experience tells me the deer will continue to eat the apples as far into the winter as they can, ambling along the Apple Path and scratching through the snow to reach the fruit that remains long after it ripened and fell.

When the snow becomes deep, the deer keep to their sheltered, hidden places. The bears, too, will have hunkered down by then, hopefully well fed on fall’s bounty. Winter’s starkness will again reveal the bones of the trees and lead me once more to thoughts of pruning – someday.

 
Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the October 11, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Apples in Abundance

Everywhere I look this fall I find apples: hanging from the gnarled trees in the untamed orchard of our back field, clinging to the branches of the spindly old apple trees along the back roads of my regular travels, beckoning from gone-wild trees encroaching the parking lots of downtown stores. More apples in more places than I remember from past autumns. They taunt me in their numbers, and I feel a slight desperation to pick as many as I can, lest they all go to waste.

This is the reason I sow only two zucchini seeds in my garden each spring, and plant only a few tomato seedlings. This is why in August I had to make myself ignore the wild blueberries still so copiously ripening in a field we passed nearly every day. There are only so many ways to eat zucchini. I’ve never been much good at making tomato sauce. We ran out of room in the freezer for blueberries – and my children grew tired of my endless, insurmountable desire to pick berries in the hot sun when there was cool water just around the bend.

I have a hard time letting the extras go.

So I have been making applesauce and apple crisp and apple muffins. There is comfort in the scent of warm apples mixed with cinnamon wafting from the kitchen on a fall day, when the air is crisp but not cold, when the leaves are changing but have not yet left the trees bare of color, when the grass still needs mowing but is sometimes crusted with frost in the morning.

I have tucked apple muffins into lunchboxes this week and apple sauce into the freezer. We have feasted on apple crisp, spiced and warm from the oven and topped with melting ice cream. I feel as if I could – and should – keep processing apples until the pantry and freezer are full. Even then, the trees this year would still not be emptied of their fruit.

The apple trees around our house, planted in some long ago time, are a hodgepodge of long-forgotten varieties. There are about three dozen trees, some scattered without any apparent plan, others in wavering rows still evident if you look closely enough. I’ve only begun learning how to prune the trees, tackling a few late last winter, and so they are overgrown, triple the height of commercial orchard trees, with branches twining every which way. Some lean awkwardly off-kilter. Others have fallen or split and decayed and been finished by the chainsaw and added to the woodpile.

The apples growing through the field and in the side yard are green or red or pale and golden. These are not the large, perfectly formed apples of a professionally-tended orchard, nor do they hold the unnatural sheen of polished grocery store fruit. Most of our apples are not great for eating plain; they have good flavor but chewy skins, or the tartness is too biting. But they are great for sauce and for baking.

The animals we share this space with seem less picky about the flavor, the toughness of the skins, the spotted imperfections of our apples. Game trails wind through the fields, narrow swaths parting the tall, yellowing grasses and still-blooming asters, leading to the wild creatures’ favorite trees.

One tree, just beyond the back garden and at the edge of the forest, holds small, yellowish-green apples, not much to look at, and too high for us to reach. The bears love that tree. When my own children were too small to climb trees, there was a mother bear eating the windfall apples on the ground one day while her four cubs clambered around in the tree above her, each one clinging to a different branch.

Last winter, a gray fox made regular visits to the apple tree behind the clothesline, her dainty paw prints pressed into the snow all around the tree’s trunk. Not long ago a porcupine spent the morning in the branches of the apple tree closest to the house. Days later, another, larger porcupine settled below the same tree, reaching up casually every few minutes to grab an apple from a low-hanging branch, then sitting back on his haunches to enjoy the snack. Moose, deer, raccoons, turkeys: we’ve seen them all noshing on the apples, from late summer into frozen winter.

No, these apples won’t go to waste. Not with such a wild menagerie to finish them off. Still, I feel an obligation to do my part to lighten the trees’ heavy fall burden. I keep picking the apples in small batches, sometimes with the help of my children, filling coat pockets and shopping bags to carry these small treasures to the kitchen. We pile them there, like a promise, waiting until there’s time to fill the house again with the sweet tang of apples mingling with cinnamon. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 25, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Vacationland

For the past 17 years I have lived in places where other people vacation – a tiny town surrounded by tall peaks in Colorado, then a seashore village in the west of Ireland, and finally settled into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For many years I did tourism-based work: waitressing, guiding horse treks, retail jobs in ski stores and gift shops. And like most anybody who lives in Vacationland, I have occasionally been frustrated by visitors who drive too slowly while looking at the view or ask questions bordering on the absurd (“At what elevation do the deer turn to elk?” is among my favorites).

It was a refreshing role reversal, then, to travel to another Vacationland last week, exchanging the quiet mountains of home for the sandy beaches, busy ice cream shops, and whimsical mini-golf courses of Cape Cod. Here, I became the rubbernecking, out-of-town driver, peering first to the landscape of the sea and salt marshes, then to the perfectly picturesque Cape houses with their neat cedar shingles and hydrangea hedges ranging in hue from pale pink to cornflower blue and deep purple.

On the Cape in summertime, it seems the tourists outnumber the locals, but it’s easy to pick out the houses where year-round residents live. There are nameplates on the doors, sprinklers set on timers to water small lawns in the wee hours, plastic-wrapped Cape Cod Times tossed onto driveways each morning, and neat fences containing backyards with patios and swing sets.

At our home in New Hampshire, surrounded by an untamed apple orchard and wild berry brambles, we are regularly visited by moose, deer, and bear – the wildlife tourists to the area often hope to see. The week before our Cape Cod vacation we had one bear, looking for some discarded cooking grease, spend a bit too much time a bit too close to the house. We’ve also had bear cubs in the sandbox and a juvenile moose in the perennial garden.

By these large animals, my children are unfazed. But the small, lightening quick eastern cottontails of Cape Cod were fascinating. We looked for – and often found – them everywhere: the mini golf course, the back yard, on the way to the beach, on evening walks through the neighborhood. Each glimpse of brown ears and fluffy white tail elicited gleeful exclamations of “Bunny!”

An even bigger treat was the seals we spotted in the waves off Monomoy Island, where we happily traveled with friends who have a boat. The seals seemed as curious about us as we were about them, their round, black heads staring at us from the shallow water before ducking into the ocean and popping up again a few waves over.

Wading through tide pools, the kids found hermit crabs, a starfish, huge snails, mermaid’s purses, rocks in all sizes and colors and rubbed smooth by the ocean, and more shells than would fit in their plastic buckets. These things may be as common to Cape Codders as bear and moose sightings are to us, but for my New Hampshire kids, the treasures of the sea are new and wonderful and will be remembered fondly until our next visit.

This was our third annual trek to Cape Cod, and it’s become a week my children look forward to all year. For them, it’s a chance to sleep in bunk beds, play in the waves, and go for a boat ride or two. For me it’s a cherished family tradition and happy change of pace. Salt water and sea breezes are good for the soul, in the same way that clear mountain air and vistas are, or paddling along a lake where loons sound their wild cry and sunlight glints off quiet water.

No matter where you find Vacationland, a change of scenery and break in routine can be refreshing, invigorating, recharging. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a breath of fresh air is available any time from the front porch, the windows frame a stellar mountain view each day, and you’re more likely to be delayed talking with a neighbor at the post office than stuck in a traffic jam.

Still, it’s nice, sometimes, to get out of town. It was a joy to spend a week at the beach. And it was a blessing to return to the mountains, a Vacationland for many, but simply home to me.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the Aug. 9, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.