Ancient chemical warfare

I’m sometimes asked if the prehistoric Cherokees used any sort of poisons on their blowgun darts. These darts (slivers of black locust, hickory, or white oak) were from 10- to 20-inches long with thistledown tied at one end to form an air seal in the blowgun (a hollowed piece of cane cut to a length of 7 to 9 feet). The Cherokees were accurate with these weapons up to 40 or 60 feet, especially when shooting birds, but there is no evidence they used poisons of any sort on their darts.

They did, however, routinely employ poisons from several native plants when fishing. The drugging of fish was practiced during the dry months of late summer and early fall when water flow in mountain streams is often low, thereby creating a series of small pools with high concentrations of fish.

The two plants commonly used to stupefy fish were yellow buckeye (Aesculus octandra) and goat’s rue (Tephrosia virginica), which is also known as devil’s shoestring or catgut.

Buckeye nuts were ground up and thrown into the pools of water. The poison thereby released was aesculin. This toxin caused the fish to float to the surface where they were easily collected and thrown up on the bank in long-handled baskets made for that purpose. I do not know if the aesculin posed a risk to humans eating the fish.

Goat’s rue is still common in open or waste areas throughout the old Cherokee country. Easily recognized as a member of the Pea Family by its pinnate leaves that bear 17-29 leaflets, the silky-hairy plant (1-2 feet high) displays bi-colored, irregularly shaped flowers (yellow base, pink wings) throughout the summer.

The Cherokees and other Indian tribes in the southeastern United States collected goat’s rue and ground it up on posts resting on the bottom of a pool. Shortly after the ground plant materials fell into and saturated the water, paralyzed fish would float to the surface for collection. The toxic substance in goat’s rue is rotenone, which is the principal ingredient in various insecticides and modern fish poisons. By attacking the nervous system of the fish, rotenone did not poison the meat in any way.

The prehistoric Cherokees also speared fish, caught them with lines and bone hooks, shot them with bows and arrows, and grabbed them with their bare hands. But their most productive tactic involved the use of the rock weirs and fish traps. Located throughout the southern mountain region wherever the Cherokees located their large villages alongside major streams, these devices allowed for huge quantities of fish to be taken at one time.

Weirs were constructed where the water was swift. Two converging, wall-like alignments formed a V-shape. Facing downstream, the V-shaped structure funneled fish into a wicker or log trap. Harvesting the fish swept into the traps was a piece of cake.

(One of the most accessible of these ancient rock weirs is located alongside N.C. 28 about five miles north of Franklin across from the Cowee Gift Shop. This trap was maintained by white families who lived in the area into the 1930s, when the state outlawed the practice.)

However they procured them, the Cherokees prized fish like catfish that — with their skins still attached — could be easily smoked and dried so as to provide a supply of protein during the long winter months.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Dogwoods in the mountains

In the Smokies region, there are three species of dogwood. Everyone is familiar with flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), which is starting to flower this week, but the others are less well known.

Alternate-leaved or pogada dogwood (C. alternifolia) is the only alternate-leaved dogwood in North America. It’s a small tree (15-25 feet tall) that grows in rich woods, producing greenish-white flowers in late spring and handsome dark blue-black fruits on reddish stems in late summer. Frequent at all elevations, it is perhaps more common in the middle to higher elevations

Silky dogwood (C. amomum) is a coarse shrub that grows in marshes or along stream banks. Its whitish, relatively flat flower heads appear in mid-spring. The fruit turns black as the season progresses.

If the cardinal is the signature bird of the southeastern United States, flowering dogwood is the signature tree. It is so widely admired that numerous cultivated varieties have been developed, including the popular pink “rubra” form.

Pause to take a closer look this spring at a dogwood inflorescence. Numerous tiny yellow flowers, each bearing four petals, will be clustered at the center. This cluster will be bordered by four large petal-like bracts. These shining white bracts, which can be seen from afar, serve the same purpose as petals — they attract insects to the tiny flowers that gather nectar and, in the process, pollinate the tree.

In just about every spring identification workshop I lead there will be someone who will ask in a loud voice, “You know, don’t you, the best way to recognize a dogwood tree?” While everyone else is groaning, the same person will quickly answer, “By its bark.”

Well, a dogwood tree’s “bark” is distinctive in that it is broken into tiny squares one inch or less across. But according to one source, the common name derives from the fact that the inner bark was once used to make a strong medicine for washing sick dogs. And according to another source the name comes from “dagwood,” from the use of the slender stems of its very hard wood for making “dags” (i.e., daggers and skewers).

The Indians called it “arrow wood” — a clear indication of how they used the branches. The pioneers made horse collars, cogs for gristmills, and shuttles for weaving looms from dogwood.

Our mountain landscape would be severely reduced by an absence of flowering dogwood. The anthracnose fungus that has devastated Pacific dogwood (C. nuttallii) in the northeastern United States and flowering dogwood in parts of the eastern United States has also been a problem in portions of the Smokies region. An informative USDA Forest Service site titled “How to Identify and Control Dogwood Anthracnose” can be accessed at: http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/howtos/ht_dogwd/ht_dog.htm.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Old stone walls redux

(Author’s Note: While running random Internet searches, I occasionally am confronted from out of the blue, as it were, with something I wrote years ago that I’d absolutely forgotten I’d written and failed to store in my computer files. Most of the time I’m not particularly pleased with former musings that pop up in this manner, almost always seeing in them much that I wished I hadn’t written or, at the very least, done a little better job with at the time. Sometimes, however, an epistle from the past looks OK. I think to myself: “Well, that’s that ... not sure I could have done that one much better ... someone else doubtless could and will ... but that’s my best shot.” Here’s one of those few Back Then columns — originally published in Smoky Mountain News on May 16, 2001 — that falls into that category. I couldn’t, of course, resist making a few revisions here and there.)

We are attracted to those places where the forces of the natural and human worlds have come to terms with one another and live in harmony: dilapidated barns chocked full of hay; long-established but abandoned garden spots that produce showy perennials year to year on their own; and homesteads by a creek with lamplight gleaming in the window, smoke curling upward into the starry night.

Old stone walls are the epitome of this sort of balanced existence. Built with hard labor and real care by human hands using the most basic of materials, the stone walls that trace the woodlands and fields here in the mountains often assume a life of their own, existing somewhere between man’s obvious utilitarian desires and nature’s sly chaos. A stone wall that once stood up the creek from our place here on the southern slope of the Smokies near the national park boundary line was typical of most such structures.

It was surely nothing special to look at. About 50 feet in length and several feet high and wide, it wasn’t a pretentious structure by any means. Even as walls go, it was a pretty quiet wall. But it was also a clear sign of some previous family’s attempt to make a permanent statement about their residence in and care for a particular patch of ground. The wall lined a footpath that wound up the creek through a small wooded area to where a footbridge once led out into the “real” world.

These days the “real” world has encompassed that wooded area. Some years ago we spent an afternoon with a chainsaw, hoes, and bare hands reclaiming the wall from honeysuckle and poison ivy vines. Many of the stone walls and piles up on the slopes above the valley were built as a way to stack and remove field stones from areas planted in crops, mostly corn. Beyond serving as refuse areas and ways to prevent soil erosion, they are not especially attractive. But the wall through the woodland beside the creek was built as a way to define a quiet pathway — a link — between the fields and the various homesteads. It was a calculated down-to-earth rural project that was also a spiritual statement of sorts.

John Burroughs, my favorite 19th century naturalist, once observed in an essay titled “Notes By The Way” that he “often thought what a chapter of natural history might be written on ‘Life Under a Stone,’ so many of our smaller creatures take refuge there — ants, crickets, spiders, wasps, bumblebees, the solitary bee, mice, toads, snakes, and newts. What do these things do in a country without stones? A stone makes a good roof, a good shield; it is waterproof and fire-proof, and, until the season becomes too rigorous, frost-proof, too. The field mouse wants no better place to nest than beneath a large, flat stone, and the bumblebee is entirely satisfied if she can get possession of a mouse’s old or abandoned quarters.”

Burroughs was writing about stones in general, of course, but his observations would also apply to stone walls, which are — in my opinion — incomplete without chipmunks. I always hoped a pair would take up residence in this partially tumbled-down stone wall, but they never did. Copperheads lived there. And skinks and mice. Crusted, flat lichens decorated the stones, creating fantastic maps with their doily-like patterns. Some of these slow-growing lichen patches were so large they obviously predated the wall-building itself by centuries. They were perhaps there when the first Indians walked the watershed we now reside in thousands of years ago.

When I paused and studied the wall, it was difficult to discern just where the soil of the pathway ended and the lichen-splotched stone began. These two entities had gradually assimilated, blended, and become one. This path and wall become a part of our family’s everyday existence — a designated wayfare for coming and going by daylight or starlight or moonlight. Even when we didn’t notice the wall, it ordered an important portion of our lives by its very presence. It was a soothing, undemanding, stable presence that was always there and would always be there, I supposed. After all, what can happen to a stone wall? In a single day — less than eight hours — the wall was obliterated by a bulldozer. The new owner of the land above ours on the creek cleared the area for rental cabins. It wasn’t our land or our wall. I don’t regret that I didn’t take a photograph. The sun-dappled pathway and its quiet border of hand-laid stones live on in our memories and those of our children. That’s a species of immortality, I suppose.

 

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Bluebirds continue to fascinate

My oh my what a wonderful day

Plenty of sunshine in my way

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

Zip-a-dee-eh

Mr Bluebird’s on my shoulder

It’s the truth, it’s actual

Everything is satisfactual

 

Through the years, I’ve written more than a few columns about eastern bluebirds. Mostly I’ve focused on when or where to put out bluebird houses. The best time to set them out is very early spring or even late winter — but you can do so right now with some chance of success. Keep trying different spots in open areas near perches until you find a location they like. Don’t place them very close to one another.

But I’ve never written about their songs. The early 20th century ornithologist A.C. Bent was of the opinion that the bluebird is, “No great singer; he cannot begin to compete with the greatest songsters of the thrush family.” Well, in our region, the thrush family includes birds like wood thrushes and veerys, both of which are terrific singers. It’s hard to compete in company like that.

Nevertheless, to my ears, the bluebird’s song has always seemed exceedingly pleasant. And now that I’ve read The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005) by Donald Kroodsma, I’ll be even more attuned to their varied singing strategies.

Kroodsma singles out a particular bird and records it time and again, capturing on tape the myriad vocalizations that that individual utilizes while mating, feeding, defending territory, and raising young. Later he transcribes the individual songs into sonograms (visual renderings of the songs) and utilizes computer technology to enhance and analyze the data.

After awhile, sometimes after many months or even years, Kroodsma begins to “see” what the birds are up to with their vocalizations. In other words, listen carefully and listen often, but don’t expect each song to be a carbon copy. Individual male bluebirds will vary in their vocalizations — and the same bird’s song will differ some from vocalization to vocalization, or from place to place, or during different times of the day, and so on.

Roger Tory Peterson described the bluebird’s song as “a musical ‘chur-wi’ ... 3 or 4 soft gurgling notes.” For David Allen Sibley, the song is a “pleasing soft phrase of mellow ‘chiti WEEW wewidoo’ and variations.”

The Birds of America Online (subscription) Web site provides the following observations in regard to various eastern bluebird vocalizations:

“’Tu-a-wee’ is the most common vocalization ... [It is] loud and low pitched, with an abrupt beginning.

“Their ‘loud song’ is a rich warbling, low in pitch and often rapidly delivered, usually by males ... During singing bouts, the male may pivot his body so that he sings sequentially in opposite directions. Sometimes the male spreads his tail while singing or lifts his tail vertically. Males sing their ‘loud song” from conspicuous high perches, sometimes in flight ... They give the ‘loud song’ as advertisement of territory establishment and to attract breeding females.

“Sometimes called a ‘whisper song,’ their ‘soft song’ [is given] when females are laying eggs [and] may function to assure her of the male’s presence.

“Sometimes preceded by one or more clicks, the ‘predator song’ (also called the ‘anger song’) is given in the presence of nest predators by either males or females from protected perches.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Making friends with an injured crow

According to the current Ornithological Union listing, the appropriate non-scientific name for a crow is “common crow.” How apt! Like most commonly observed objects, crows, for the most part, flit across our field of vision unheeded. Cawing, they flap away over the fields and into the woods like pieces of black flannel caught in a breeze. We hear and see them, but we don’t really pay attention. We rarely think about them. We never ask ourselves, “What are these birds up to?”

But that’s not the case with Lake Junaluska resident Sue Ellen Jackson. Lately, she’s been observing crows up close and personal — one crow in particular. His name is Roger. Here’s the story.

Some weeks ago, Jackson sent me the following email: “I often have crows visiting my porch (usually about five of them who all come together) because I put out assorted bird seed and food scraps, including small chunks of meat, fish, poultry, bread and leftover cat food .... the crows like the hearty food and it keeps them from stealing the seeds and nuts from the smaller birds. My other regular visitors include titmice, chickadees, house or purple finches (I can’t tell which), towhees, sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, etc. I just scatter the seed and scraps rather than using a feeder, as this allows more birds to feed at one time, and the larger area gives each species plenty of room since they aren’t competing with bigger birds for the same food. Plus, I can watch them up close, which I enjoy.

“A couple days ago, I noticed an injured crow on the porch. One wing appeared to be dragging a bit, and I could see some feathers missing near his ‘shoulder.’ I tried to catch him in a box but he was able to evade me and run away (he couldn’t fly) and I was in my pajamas so I couldn’t chase him very far. He was back again today. He is able to hop up on the porch (the patio ledge is about 2-feet tall) and he seems healthy except for his wing, though I don’t know how long he can survive without being able to fly, especially in winter.

“I put out lots of extra food today and he ate well, then wandered off again, but I’m worried that some neighborhood cat or other predator will get him. Is there any animal-welfare agency that could trap him and fix his wing, or put him in a bird sanctuary if it can’t be repaired? Or, will it heal on its own, if I can provide plenty of food for him until it does?”

I replied: “Hello Sue Ellen . . . call one of your local animal hospitals and see if they know of anyone who does wild animal rescues ... let me know what happens ... good luck, George.”

On March 20, I received another email from Sue Ellen: “I’ve been meaning to get back to you about the injured crow I wrote about before. I was going to make another attempt to trap him so he could go to ‘bird rehab’ but he kept his distance. So I kept putting food out for him (table scraps — lots of protein and fat to help his bones mend) along with the regular birdseed (several kinds). At first he could only hop, but to my amazement his broken wing healed very quickly and soon he was able to fly, though at very low altitude ... barely a foot off the ground. The wing healed at a bit of an angle, and, when he walks, the wing tip touches the ground, but now he is flying just fine with the other members of his flock. He comes to my ‘bird breakfast buffet’ every morning, sometimes alone and sometimes with his pals. A happy ending.”

This past Monday afternoon I called Sue Ellen for an update. She reported that Roger’s doing fine and still comes to her porch a couple of times a day. Sometimes he brings along one or more of his crow pals. But most of the time he comes alone because, “He seems to like getting all the food himself,” noted Jackson. When asked, she added that she named him Roger, “Because he reminds me of a pirate, as in Jolly Roger.” She obviously likes Roger, and the feelings are apparently mutual. For her, Roger’s no longer a “common crow.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Uplifted by the flight of birds

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about birds. I guess I have them on my mind, in part, because the spring migration season is underway. I heard my first Louisiana waterthrush (a warbler) of the year this past Sunday morning. But then again, birds are always on my mind summer, fall, and winter, too. And I’m not alone. Each week that I write about birds, I receive at least 10 emails from readers who share their bird observations and insights with me. Here we go again.

I’ve always supposed that we’re fascinated by birds because they are attractive, often beautiful. And they can sing and fly. Unlike me, many of you who are reading this can actually sing. So you will not be as awe-struck by that capability as I am. But my guess is that few of you can fly.

Just how bird flight evolved has been hotly debated in academic circles. For what it’s worth, I suspect that those who maintain that bird life evolved from ancient dinosaurs are going to prevail. Their case has been strengthened in recent years by a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. The team unearthed a juvenile dromaeosaur dating back 130 million years, which proved to be the first dinosaur discovered with a body covering apparently consisting of fossilized feathers and down.

Bird flight has no doubt come a ways since those long-ago days when dromaeosaurs were flapping around trying their best to become airborne. As we can readily observe on a daily basis, many modern species have become aerial specialists.

Turkey vultures are generally underrated in this regard. They are experts at reading the thermals created as the earth warms each day. Have you ever spotted a flock of vultures riding upwards in the same thermal in a circular flight pattern? Ornithologists call that “a kettle of vultures.”

Think of the explosive and thereby elusive flight pattern displayed by a turkey, grouse, or bobwhite. Then there is the ungainly, yet somehow graceful, flight of a great blue heron, arising awkwardly with a croak and then leveling out in a long smooth glide.

Among raptors, the peregrine falcon is the speed king. One of the most amazing birds in the world, a peregrine feeds on other birds that it takes in mid-air with a powerful dive that may reach speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds are the showboats of the bird world. Their wing beats, which stroke the air at more than 70 times a second, are often heard before one actually sees the bird. They hover, they fly backwards or vertically, and they zoom around. Then, just for the pure fun of it, they dive bomb one another.

One spring day from a high outcrop I watched a pair of ravens mating over Blue Valley near Highlands. Together, they would go so high up into the air that they looked like dark specks. Then they would plummet in tandem, making tight downward spirals, until it appeared they were going to crash into the valley floor. At the very last microsecond, they’d pull out of their dive and then do it all over again.

Another time, I was at Blue Valley watching ravens from a high overlook when one sailed by and eyed me. The first time he came back he did a full somersault. And then, just for good measure, he came by again and did a full body roll, flying for a beat or so while upside down.

“Now that’s flying,” the raven seemed to be telling me.

Barn swallows are the ballet dancers of the bird world. They bring flying to another level. I never tire of watching the patterns — intricate, endless, ever changing, and yet somehow the same — they etch against the sky.

Little wonder that the ancient Cherokees made the birds the guardians of their Upper World, the realm of peace and light and the hereafter. With their songs and with their flight patterns, the birds continue to lift our spirits every day.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The curious habits of birds

The curious lifestyles and distinctive habits one can observe in the bird world are continually fascinating.

Some things you can count on to occur with regularity. Each year, in late spring or early summer, blue jays will gather into communal flocks that scour the woodlands seeking and devouring bird eggs and young birds. They go about this grim task systematically, decimating a chosen watershed one day before moving over to the adjacent one the following day.

For years I’ve tried to discourage these ravaging hordes when they pillage lower Lands Creek in Swain County, where we live. I’ve even resorted to firing shotgun blast after shotgun blast in their general direction, not actually aiming at them. But they simply squawk, move a bit out of range, and continue what seems to be their appointed task. Indeed, I wonder, is this ravaging a necessary part of natural order, a way of “thinning the herd,” so to speak? If so, I still don’t like it a bit.

Each fall one can count on pairs of pileated woodpeckers to go through a mock mating ritual. The male flies about the woodlands hammering and calling to the female, who responds in kind. On one level, they’re probably just re-establishing territorial boundary lines for the coming breeding season. But the rituals seemingly go beyond this. Since pileated woodpeckers mate for life, it’s also likely that the males and females are renewing their relationship for the coming year — sort of like making your wedding vows on an annual basis. Such pair bonding is not at all uncommon in the natural world.

One of the most unusual instances of bird behavior that I’ve observed was seeing a brown thrasher deliberately alight on an anthill and proceed to rub ant after ant all over the underside of its body. I was jogging along a sandy stretch of road when I saw the thrasher alight on the anthill; he was still there when I jogged away 10 minutes later.

I subsequently learned that ornithologists refer to this ritual as anting. They’re not quite sure just what the songbirds that utilize it are up to. The entry on “anting” in The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds (1988) notes that “the most reasonable assumption seems to be that it is a way of acquiring defensive secretions of ants, primarily for their insecticidal, miticidal, fungicidal, or bactericidal properties and perhaps secondarily, as a supplement to the bird’s own preen oil.”

That seems to be a fancy way of saying that ants help birds ward off insects and body diseases. It’s probable that the formic acid emitted by the disturbed ants helps free the bird of feather and skin parasites.

In addition to grabbing the ants with their bills and applying the insects directly to their bodies, birds will sometimes simply nestle down into an anthill and allow the critters to crawl over them freely. If a bird can stand it, this is no doubt the most effective way of tidying up. Just writing about it makes my skin crawl.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Popeyed pleasures

Many people who spend some time walking the woodland stream banks and other wet areas here in the Smokies region have had the memorable experience of flushing a woodcock — that secretive, rotund, popeyed, little bird with an exceedingly long down-pointing bill which explodes from underfoot and zigzags away on whistling wings while just barely managing bat-like to dodge tree limbs and trunks.

Even if you see the woodcock land and think you’ve marked the exact spot, you’ll have a difficult time relocating it on the forest floor. The bird’s brown, barred, and cross-hatched plumage simulates dead leaf litter to perfection.

My wife, Elizabeth, and I used to jump woodcocks on a fairly frequent basis — especially this time of the year — along a trail that no longer exists due to development on neighboring property. The trail led through a rocky wooded area just across the footbridge leading to our house. In the soft mud along the creek, it was easy to locate “poke holes” — the numerous round openings woodcocks leave wherever they’ve been searching for earthworms.

Their foraging technique and bill are interesting items. In order to locate worms, woodcocks sometimes perform a “foot stomping” routine that causes the prey to move underground. These birds have keen hearing, with ear openings located below and ahead of the eyes that are ideally situated for “earthworming.”

Once movement is detected, the woodcock plunges its bill into the mud. A normal bird would at this point have difficulty opening its bill so as to grasp and ingest. But there’s no such problem for the woodcock, which can open the flexible tip-end of its prehensile bill and suck the critters right in.

“Because of its mud-probing foraging technique, the woodcock’s rather large eyes are set high and back on its head,” writes Jim Clark in an article entitled “The Tumbling Timberdoodle” that appeared in “Birder’s World” magazine. “This placement not only helps keep mud and debris out of the eyes, but also provides an additional advantage in protection.

“Its field of vision completely encircles it, enabling the bird to see directly behind itself, much to the dismay of a predator or researcher trying to capture and band it.”

Even more fascinating than the woodcock’s foraging technique and defensive eye-placement are the “nuptial” rituals involving a “falling-leaf” aerial descent performed over established “singing grounds.”

“If the winter has been mild, these vocal and non-vocal sounds (the bird produces a twittering sound with its wing primaries as it spirals downward) may be heard as early as the first week of January and will continue into April,” notes ornithologist Fred Alsop in Birds of the Smokies (1991). “The best places to look are overgrown fields, wet seepage areas, and woodland edges where the bird quietly spends the day and where its staple food of earthworms can be found. Locate your ‘spot’ during the day and return at just about sunset. Most of the singing and display begins about a half hour after sundown, especially on those nights when the temperature is mild and there is little wind ... The ‘peent’ note given on the ground may remind you of the call of a frog or the common nighthawk. Good places to listen are sites below 2,000 feet with the habitats listed above, including [in the national park] the Sugarlands Visitor Center, Oconaluftee, and Cades Cove.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Cowbirds a favorite to despise

Some folks can’t stand house sparrows (a native of north Africa and Eurasia) while others detest starlings (a native of Europe). Both species were introduced into this country in the 19th century. While I don’t especially admire house sparrows and starlings, my favorite bird to despise is the brown-headed cowbird, a native of North America.

The brown-headed cowbird is the black sheep of the blackbird family, which numbers among its kind such upright and attractive denizens of the bird world as bobolinks, meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, and Baltimore orioles. Unlike most blackbirds, which have long sharp-pointed bills, the cowbird displays a short sparrow-like bill.The male’s lower body has the shiny-black coloration of, say, a grackle, but its head is glossy-brown. The female is a plain gray-brown above, paler below.

I often hear cowbirds before seeing them. They “sing” a squeaky, not entirely unpleasant, “glug-glug-glee” gurgling song and emit a call that is a sort of rattling “check.” Look up and you’ll spot them perched on an extended branch or wire. They seem to teeter back and forth on their perches like drunken high wire artists. But, alas, they never fall.

Here comes the bad part. Along with its cousins the shiny cowbirds, a South American species that appears in the Deep South, and the western bronzed cowbirds, the brown-headed cowbird is the only North American songbird that regularly practices “brood parasitism,” which is a fancy way of saying that it lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and leaves the rearing of its young up to them. Yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos will rarely lay an egg in another species’ nest.

According to Fred Alsop’s Birds of the Smokies (1991), the cowbird’s “scientific name (Molothus ater) can be translated to ‘black parasite,’ [as] the female selects the active nest of another species ... and lays her eggs there, often removing an egg of the host for each one she lays .... Fledgling cowbirds seem to be perpetually famished and my attention has often been drawn to the sight of a scurrying vireo or song sparrow feverishly trying to collect and transport insect after insect to the gaping mouth of its constantly calling ‘baby’ cowbird. The foster child is often considerably larger than the attendant ‘parent.’”

The brown-headed cowbird will lay their eggs in the nests of over 75 other species, mostly those smaller than themselves. Each female deposits up to 25 or more eggs per nesting season. The energy toll this takes on the hosts, which can’t seem to resist the urge to raise the ravenous baby cowbirds, is enormous.

It’s estimated that well over a million cowbird eggs are laid every year. Not a single one is laid in a nest built by a cowbird. Not a single one is hatched by a cowbird. And not a single cowbird baby is fed and raised by a cowbird. Female cowbirds do hang around the nest sites and lead their young away once the energy-intensive work of rearing them to flying size has been accomplished.

At “The Birds of America Online” (a site sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Ornithologist’s Union) it is noted that: “Impact on host species depends on how distribution and abundance patterns of host and cowbird match. The red-winged blackbird, likely North America’s most common species, is an important cowbird host though sheer numbers, even though the percentage of nests parasitized is low. At the other extreme, Kirtland’s warblers produce few cowbirds, although its own existence is actually threatened by brood parasitism because such a high percentage of its nests are parasitized.”

In our region wood thrush, yellow warbler, red-eyed and yellow-throated vireo, ovenbird, American redstart, phoebe, and indigo bunting nest sites are favorite targets of female cowbirds.

How did cowbird brood parasitism evolve? Some ornithologists conjecture that the bird once followed roving bands of bison to feed (then being known as “buffalo birds”) so that they had little or no time to nest in one spot. It therefore became expedient to simply lay their eggs along the way in the nests of other birds. With the demise of the bison herds, the cowbird shifted its attention to cows, thereby spreading east from the great prairies into farming areas. If you visit a dairy operation or other place where there are cows, you’ll find cowbirds. But they’re not all that particular these days — you’ll also find them in low-elevation towns and open woodlands throughout the Smokies region.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Reservoir rendezvous

Joe Wright was born and raised in the high Nantahalas in the northwest corner of Macon County. He was 90-some-years-old when I interviewed him back in the early 1990s or thereabouts and made the notes upon which this account, in part, is based.

Wright took a job with the Nantahala Power and Light Co. (now a subsidiary of Duke Power Company) and did survey and other work for the company “off and on” for 40 years. He remembered when the massive Nantahala Dam — 250-feet high, 1,042-feet long, impounding a 1,605-acre lake — was built in the early 1940s. It was a project that pioneered the rock-fill method of using earth and rock instead of all-concrete to build large dams.

Wright also vividly recalled construction in the Nantahalas that resulted in hydroelectric impoundments so small that they’re called “vest pocket” dams.

Two of these are situated in the Aquone area on Dick’s and Whiteoak creeks, emptying their waters via connector pipes into the main Nantahala Dam pipe that leads above and below ground almost 30,000-feet down to the Beechertown substation at the head of the lower Nantahala Gorge (near the present day raft put-in areas). A few miles to the east at the head of the Winding Stairs road there’s the Queen’s Creek dam, which has its own pipe leading directly down to the Beachertown substation.

These three facilities are small impoundments; indeed, the ones at Whiteoak and Dick’s creeks are duck-pond size, having dams that are about 75-feet wide that back up water not more than 150 or so feet. But there’s yet another facility on the Diamond Valley drainage above Dick’s Creek that can be classified as tiny. Locals who worked at the dam construction sites refer to these lilliputian constructions as “watch fob” or “virgin” dams.

At 12-feet across, 6-feet high, and pooling up just enough water to take a shallow bath in, the Diamond Valley dam, built in 1948, was supposed by Nantahala officials back in the early 1990s to be the world’s smallest hydroelectric dam used for commercial purposes.

Located at 2,935-feet elevation, it’s the highest of the dams in the Nantahala system. An 18-inch pipe from the little dam runs down about 100 yards to the Dick’s Creek impoundment, which it empties into with a sparkling gush through a concrete conduit, adding its bit to the generating capacity of the entire system.

Nantahala officials were — and probably still are — fond of the Diamond Valley midget. “If a dam can be cute, this one is,” said Fred Alexander, the company’s manager of corporate communications at that time

And neither did they scoff at its capabilities. Each year, according to Alexander, water siphoned from the Diamond Valley watershed added “approximately 1,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity, enough to supply power for 111 homes based on 9,000 kilowatt hours per home per year.” Maintenance was minimal, involving little more than periodic leaf removal from the outflow screen and the cutting back of brush, for a system that contributed about $50,000 worth of water annually.

“The Dick’s Creek dam was built by men working around the clock in shifts,” recalled Wright. “Dump trucks brought in rock and we laid it out in three tiered sections of 50-feet each.”

The flat location chosen for that dam and pond placed it about 100 yards above the mouth of Diamond Valley Creek. Therefore, as Wright recalled, in order to collect Diamond Valley’s output, the connecting pipe had to be run underground at an angle back up Dick’s Creek’s under Junaluaka Road. It was a cunning bit of micro-engineering.

When the observation was put to him that, “You dam-builders seemed determined to gather just about every last drop of available water,” Joe Wright rocked forward in his chair, eyes glittering with mirth, and nodded assent.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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