"Rock Castle Gorge"

Rocky Knob Migration Watch, Fall 2010: Report # 1


American Copper (Lycaena phlaeas), nectaring on white clover bloom.

Sunday 29 August 2010

Bruce Grimes & I arrived at Rocky Knob at Noon and stayed till 4 p.m. We were playing hooky from a lot of tasks that we both need to get done, but the hours of migration watch were worth it.

First, some background:

Rocky Knob Hawk Watch occurs at milepost 168 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We watch from the Saddle Overlook sometimes, which gives us a fairly good view of Rock Castle Gorge to the east, and Buffalo Mountain westward. Mostly we watch from a large pasture just to the north of the Saddle Overlook parking lot. We affectionately call this location the Cow Pie Palace.

The hawk watch is occasional, mostly on weekends, and even then we seem to steal time from other activities. I wish that it could be closer to more daily monitoring of migration.

There are other hawk migration watch sites on the Parkway, and these are monitored far more frequently than our migration watch site at Rocky Knob:

Rockfish Gap (aka Afton Mountain)
Harvey's Knob
Mahogany Rock

If you are in this part of the universe, stop by and take a look for yourself: hawks are circling, gliding, soaring, flapping, hurrying or easing southward. So are many other species of birds: ruby-throated hummingbirds, chimney swifts, swallows, thrushes, warblers, tanagers, orioles, and many other kinds. And other creatures are pushing south also: several kinds of dragonflies, mostly common green darners, black saddlebags, wandering gliders, and twelve-spotted skimmers; and several species of butterflies too: besides monarchs, these include, Cloudless Sulphurs, Sleepy Orange Sulphurs, Little Yellows, Variegated Fritillaries, Eastern Commas, Mourning Cloaks, Painted Ladies, American Ladies, Red Admirals, and Common Buckeyes.

As soon as we got there yesterday, we noticed that Common Buckeyes, and Common Green Darners were flying by. We stayed busy trying to watch high and low for species that were on the move. The buckeyes mostly flew low just above grass blade and cow pie, but a few of them were actually fairly high up--one even buzzed a black saddlebags dragonfly, then flew on south. Some of the monarchs and buckeyes, the two most common insect migrants yesterday, would stop a while and refuel at thistle blossoms.


Tally for the 29th:

Raptors:

Osprey 1
American Kestrel 1

Other migrating birds:

Chimney Swift 16
Ruby-throated Hummingbird 5 (two were adult males)
Barn Swallow 5
Scarlet Tanager 2

Migrating butterflies:

Variegated Fritillary 1
American Lady 1
Painted Lady 1
unidentified Vanessa sp. 2
Common Buckeye 34
Monarch 31

Migrating Dragonflies:

Common Green Darner 20
Spot-winged Glider 2
Wandering Glider 1
Black Saddlebags 23
Carolina Saddlebags 1

Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele), nectaring on thistle.

There were many other species of butterflies nectaring on thistles and other flowers in the fields: seemed to be gazillions of Pipevine and Eastern Tiger Swallowtails, one female Black Swallowtail, a few Spicebush Swallowtails, lots of Great Spangled Fritillaries (probably close to 100) and three Aphrodite Fritillaries, and one male Diana Fritillary. There were a few American Coppers, and a small horde of Peck's Skippers and Sachems!

The one Painted Lady that migrated through the field, stopped a couple of times for a portrait pose while it nectared on some flowers. Bruce got some pictures of this critter, plus some of the other butterfly species.

Hopefully there will be a few more migration reports during September. Please do stop by and check out the migration scene at Rocky Knob.


Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui), nectaring on a thistle flower. Thistles are also host plants for the caterpillars. Painted Ladies have nearly worldwide distribution, and are one of the most common migrating butterflies in the world.

Two poems from a long while back

I'm sharing two poems that were published back in the mid 1990s in a little Georgia magazine, Red Mountain Rendezvous. The first, "White Gate Prison" is a draft where I surrendered after 14 years of trying to get the best words and images I could think of: words for an important journey...a trip I took by car with my mother and one of my aunts. I was five years old. We traveled from Ferrum to Bland Correctional Unit, a federal prison farm just inside Bland County by the border of Giles. I don't remember the roads we traveled, except for Route 42 where I saw many trees glistening with sleet. I remember my aunt and mother becoming concerned about ice on the pavement. And I remember seeing my father for a little time.

The second poem, "Buren Pendleton" is a poem about a grandfather I never met. Buren Clyde Pendleton died when my mother was six years old. Of the little that I know about him, he was a marvelous fiddler, and he would call the dance moves at square dances. My grandmother and my grandfather Buren had seven daughters. I enjoy legends about the Pleiades because of the seven stars / seven sisters stories there. I have a few not so good drafts of poems about them.

One note: some Saponi people lived in the area well into the 1800s. Some of my ancestral surnames were the same as surnames among these folks, but I have not yet matched up direct connections.

Another note: Jack's Creek is a small stream flowing into Smith River near Woolwine in Patrick County. Jack's Creek Covered Bridge is there, of course, a landmark you can visit, just off Route 8. A couple of miles from there is another covered bridge: the Bobwhite Covered Bridge. Not far from Jack's Creek is Jill Creek. I may yet have to write my own rendition of a Jack and a Jill fetching something up the hill. This area of Patrick County is just a short ride from Rocky Knob and Rock Castle Gorge on the Parkway



WHITE GATE PRISON


Father stood in his cell with me,
there was sleet outside and a field
which carried me like a shadow.
His nerves were drunk with evening
and ridges that defined winter
as a place full of deer and dogs.


He asked who gutted the steer
and I said "nobody" because it stood
in the shed like a toy animal
refusing cornstalks and grain.
Its bony shoulders
rubbed and rubbed against a post.


And then my aunt and mother stood up
like women aiming to tell some truth
on his fears and dreams.
The firewood was sold.
The fences were still strong.
The hay bales listened to children and mules.
The frozen creek took a long time to thaw.




BUREN PENDLETON


He played Jack's Creek to live
fiddling and calling the dances.
One night he heard cries like a child,
maybe a panther flew like a ghost in the woods,
maybe a child squealed to mock Woolwine.


He had a wife and seven daughters
near a creek where the Saponi were bones.
He wanted to hear their songs.


Instead he heard his name in the boneset:
sickly come home, weary be cold.
Then his name dissolved.
Then he dreamed he sang Barbara Allen
to the wild stones in the twining briers.


And he sang his daughters to their dreams.
He learned fictions. He kept news.
But he could not coax away the silence:
it was born, it could haunt.


Copyright 2009, Clyde Kessler