Hitchhiking on the Hudson

Every boater and his cousin is out on the Hudson River on this fourth of July when I slide in off of the dock in Athens. The DEC has put in a new, wonderful dock there making entry a lot of fun. Just east is the dredge-created island, Middle Ground Flats. The sun is high, and far too hot. There’s a whitewash of cloud covering a too-blue sky. What I tell myself is that for most of these boaters this is their first time on the water this year. This makes them happy but perhaps unskilled boaters. And, given that it’s the fourth of July it’s also possible they are drunk. I paddle, keeping to the shallows on the western side of the river.

The water is murky brown, and turbulent from the wake of boats zipping by. There are boats towing children on floating tubes and boaters loitering as people drop a fishing line in the water. There are jet skis galore, making circles in the water. And almost no sailboats. But most are mid-sized motorboats, shoving purposefully north or south.

As I paddle I look at the wisp of clouds in front of me and think: I don’t know anything about clouds. And yes, then I sing to myself, softly…

(I look up at home that I was looking at wispy cirrus clouds then later puffier cumulous clouds; I still, however, know nothing about love. I mean clouds.)

This stretch of the water, from Athens on the west bank and Hudson on the east is a particularly wild stretch of the river. The train tracks scoot inland leaving the banks green, and on the western side marshy with cattails. I listen for birds and in the heat of the day hear only the obvious red winged blackbird.

I am paddling north looking for a particular boat. And an hour and a half in I see it. Low in the water, moving more slowly than the playful motorboats. A gentle line. A working boat. It’s the Riverkeeper boat, the R. Ian Fletcher. The captain, my friend John Lipscomb leans out the window and I stick out my thumb. He idles the boat, then leans over to steady my kayak as I hoist myself aboard. There’s little time for hellos as he returns to the controls and points us south.

John (who I wrote about in an earlier post this spring) is out on a mid-summer patrol of the river that extends north above the Troy dam to Waterford. He’s been on his boat for a few days, taking scientists and activists on board as he checks water quality, and in general keeps a keen eye on the river.  I am the only hitchhiker he’s picked up on this trip.

“You know you’re the only one out here working today,” I say, standing next to him at the wheel, scanning out low over the water. (the photo above is the view from his controls)

He looks at me and gives me a smile that says, Don’t remind me. But it also says, Of course I am. He has worked every day since March. John works for the river.

There’s a line of plastic bottles lining one side of the boat. “Pee samples?” I ask.

“Good news,” John says. “Your Tivoli reach is cleaner.”

Earlier in the year, the water samples (which are part of a larger long-term study) off of my village had had unacceptably high levels of enterococcus.

A boat wooshes past and I wave.

“OK, let’s get this waving straight,” John says. “First, you can’t wave from inside the boat, because no one will see you.” He sticks his hand out the open sides and tips his hand. It’s not so much a wave as a palm facing outward. “This is fine, this is what guys do.”

I laugh.

“You can do this,” he says. He tips his hand a bit. “But not this,” he says waving his hand back and forth. “That’s fluttering. Birds flutter.”

“Got it,” I say, pleased with my waving instruction. I put my hand out the window and wave madly at a passing boat. John pretends not to notice.

We head south at a steady 7 knots, John and I chatting about the river, about my book, about work, about family. Though I only get to see John a few times a year, usually when he docks in Kingston, we talk like family. His mother and mine were best friends, two French women who married American men. While we talk we throw a French word in here and there, acknowledging that tie. But we’ve forged our own tie through this river, and that’s what we focus on.

Right away I jump into the news that Cuomo wants to shut down the nuclear power plant, Indian Point. This is an issue that has kept Riverkeeper focused for years and I know it’s something John cares about. I’m excited about this, taking the news at face value. But John isn’t celebrating. He’s too smart to the ways of politicians. First, what the governor can do isn’t so direct, he explains. And, isn’t it curious that this announcement comes a few days after he states that there will be fracking in New York. It’s as if the environmental issues are being balanced out: one good, one bad. I feel stupid for not seeing the bigger picture and roll into a tirade about how hydrolic fracturing, even if done outside of the state parks, or outside of Manhattan’s water supply, will affect water everywhere.  I don’t need to convince John of anything here. (Some environmental thinkers believe that if Indian Point is shut down it will create more pressure to frack as New York City needs power. I don't think these are the only two options.)

We carve in on the eastern side of Middle Ground Flats. A few years ago I paddled out to the Flats from Hudson on a hot summer evening. The island was alive with campers, and with those who had set up rogue encampments on the island. There were small shacks and tents, signs stolen from land and posted to oak trees announcing a Narrow Bridge, where there is none. A One Way sign where there are no roads. A green sign that labels this is Rayville, when there is no ville. Most of it had a quirky, fun feel to it. And some of it, like the bus seats left to rot in the sun, felt like a slum. Since then, the DEC has come in to claim the land and to clean it up. This didn’t happen without a dispute as some felt that this former underwater land created from dredge belonged to all. (photo is of the earlier Middle Ground Flats)

Despite the clean up, there are still a few shacks on the island, and a half dozen boats are anchored on the northwestern side. People splash in the water, and a few grills send off the smell of roasting burgers.

In front of us a small motorboat languishes. Three men have wooden ors in the water, stroking toward the Hudson dock. John sidles up to them. His precision in placing his boat in the water is impressive. He’s close enough that we can speak, but not so close as to rock the already struggling boaters.

“Doesn’t look good,” he says as a way of greeting.

We learn they need to get to Catskill, where they have their trailer. John tells them we’ll tow them south. They look wonderfully relieved as they throw us a thin rope.

And off we go, continuing downriver.

I tell John about one of my students at Bard College who heard him speak, who was  motivated to form a clean up club for the Tivoli Bays. John is a story teller. He’s got a great sense of pacing and a terrific sense of humor. And great scoops of outrage. So to listen to one of his stories is to want to take action then and there, to do something for the river. That’s what got my student, Gleb. He organized a clean up in the spring.

“What did you pull out?” he asks.

“Styrofoam.”

“What color was it?”

“Blue-green,” I say.

“Dock foam.” He gives me the dimensions of the huge hunks of foam I pulled out.

“That’s it. And bottles. Lots of bottles. I tried to do a sociological study from the bottles,” I say. “I wanted to show that Bud drinkers toss off more bottles than those who drink Stella. But it doesn’t work that way. Smart water drinkers litter just as those who drink Arizona Ice Tea.”

John laughs, and we talk about how garbage ends up in the river, and not always because people toss stuff overboard. It runs off from land. Boaters lose their buoys that they let drag in the water. We see a few, and scoop up. And some of it comes into the river through our sewage system. He tells me about all the condoms he saw when he was patrolling the Gowanus with a reporter on board. “Did you do a sociological study of those condoms?” I ask.

I spy an osprey nest on one of the channel markers, and look for baby osprey. A boat parade pushes north, flags waving. There’s a few motorboats and one beautiful lobster boat. “I want one of those,” I say. Being on the river makes me want a dozen boats.

“Riverkeeper, are you towing?” a voice asks over the radio. All of the boats slow as they pass us with our tow.

We wave. I get the wave right.

What I don't know about the Hooded Crow

“The crow is still there,” Peter reports.

The crow is a Hooded Crow, a bird that belongs in Eastern and Northern Europe but has, by some chance, ended up in Staten Island.

I feel a bit of relief, and pleasure in knowing it was still alive. Last weekend, Peter and I drove down to see the crow. I had not gone with enthusiasm.

We had spent Saturday morning at the Basha Kill, paddling the marsh and seeing beautiful sights. This paddle is why I took to birding: to venture out in the natural world and know what I am seeing is a joy to me. But what I’ve also learned is that to see birds, you have to go look for them. You don’t just bump into interesting birds (or, you do, but once every five years). So we looked for least bittern and found them. We saw those moorhen that should be in the Bash.

And once we were done with our paddle, we ate breakfast, drove to the Black Dirt region on the New York/New Jersey border and took a walk where we admired the black black dirt, found Savannah sparrows, green heron, but not much else in the mid-day sun. Exhausted, we loitered by the Wallkill River for a while, figuring out what next.

“I’d like to see the crow,” Peter said.

“I thought you were done chasing rarities,” I said.

“I know. But I want to see this bird.”

For some reason—and there will never be an explanation for this—he was taken with the idea of this crow. Crows are appealing birds: big, bold, aggressive in their feeding (and so sometimes called “opportunistic,” which seems oddly judgmental). They are smart, too. This past fall I had attended a John Burroughs Society lecture by Doug Robinson on crow life, learning that they form family groups and raise their young collectively. I found the social workings of crows fascinating. The Hooded Crow is also a social crow—often described as gregarious—and usually found in groups of three or four. This one, though, was alone on Staten Island. Except for a few other Hooded Crows found over the years on the continent—most of which were probably escaped domestics—this bird was now going to live a solitary Hooded Crow life.

For all the appeal of a crow, I still couldn’t see driving to Staten Island to see one. The traffic. The crowds. What bird would be worth it?

“OK,” I said.

This landed us in a hotel in New Jersey for the night. A hotel in New Jersey. The lobby swarmed with teenage girls in super high heels and super tight dresses, dancing their way to two graduation parties and one sweet sixteen party. I flip flopped my way to the room in my elegant birding pants.

In the evening we took a walk, which seemed an absurd thing to do with the roar of route 23 nearby. Yet this rush of humanity didn’t deter the wildlife: on our walk we saw several deer, and a fox flash across an abandoned road.

The next morning we were up at 5:30 and on the road toward Great Kills Park, specifically Crooke’s Point where the crow had been seen for several days. In fact, it had been seen longer than several days but only recently had a birder come along to identify it as a rare bird for the shores of North America.

We parked in a near empty lot, the ocean in front of us, and walked out a dirt road toward a gravel parking lot. The smell of the ocean floated in and the feel of sand ground beneath my feet. Dune grasses swished in the faint breeze. The sky spread wide and blue. Around us were 580 acres that make up the Great Kills Park. John Crooke, a sign told us, was a businessman, naturalist and photographer who had lived on and loved this land from his log cabin. Glossy ibis flew overhead (see photo above). A Yellow warbler sang for us.

“This is beautiful,” I said, laughing at the image I had formed of where we would be.

Peter took my hand. “This is the thing about birding. It takes you places you never thought you would go. And usually it is beautiful.”

A group of birders stood in the parking lot, binoculars and cameras at the ready. The bird had just been seen in the woods, and seemed to circle back every twenty minutes or so. We joined the crowd, making small talk. “Where are you from?” was the first question. And we learned that a group of young birders had driven ten hours to lay their eyes on this crow. The other subject was how did this bird land here? Did it hitch a ride in a container ship as a stowaway? Did it fly from Northern Ireland, where it is referred to as a “Hoodie”? Everyone seemed happy to endlessly speculate, but truth is, we would never know.

And then, suddenly, there was the bird, with is ashy grey body, with a wonderful black bib. It had the solid black bill of a crow, and a crow’s insouciance as it perched in the tree, while the group surged in to get a look.

And then, soon enough, it flew off again, escorted by some mockingbirds. Throughout the morning other birds, including an orchard oriole and a cedar waxwing, mobbed the crow, clearly sensing it did not belong there.

And the group meandered or sat in the sun, made jokes, made conversation. “Is it legit?” lurked. Legit as in, was it a bird that could be counted on an ABA life list. Now this is the sort of conversation that makes my eyes cross so I wandered off, to the beach. Peter did the same. He was a hundred paces in front of me, when I saw the bird soar overhead. “Peter!” I called. And he turned to photograph the bird in flight.

We returned to the parking lot to join the group of birders that swelled and shrunk as people came, looked, left.

“What’s everyone doing here?” a jogger asked on her daily run.

“There’s a special bird,” I said. “It belongs in Eastern Europe.”

The jogger nodded and kept going. What did she make of this, a group of people congregated to see a bird? What did I make of it? What did the bird make of it? I can not answer one of these questions.  

The report is that the bird is still there. Soon, though, a report will post letting us know the bird has vanished. And I can add, Where did the bird go?” to the long list of things that I will never know.  

All photos taken by Peter Schoenberger

Basha Kill Paddle

“Turtle!” Peter called. With two swift strokes, he paddled toward the beaver lodge and snagged the turtle before it dropped into the water.

I grinned as he held the turtle up to identify it. Clearly Peter had spent his childhood scooping up turtles—that strike and capture took years of practice.

My camera had inconveniently died just moments after taking this first of morning picture so we couldn’t photograph the turtle. “Memorize this,” Peter said. The yellow line along the face, the edge of the shell, the shape of that shell. Later we matched this small, struggling catch to a stink pot, or the common musk turtle. It slid into the water and was off. Peter put the tips of his fingers to his nose. “Smell this,” he said, and I leaned over to take in the musky smell of turtle.

Peter and I were paddling through the over 2,000 acres that make up the Basha Kill Wildlife Management Area. It’s an area that draws birders in spring migration and we had been there to spot warblers in May. We were now back looking for marsh birds and to move about by kayak, not on foot.

We had put our kayaks in the water just south of Wurtsboro, off of route 209 in Sullivan County around 6:30 in the morning. The water was clear and still, with a gorgeous fog hanging over the low lying hills that surround the marsh.

Moving by kayak was easy as the water was so high after a very wet spring. We meandered past pickerel weed, putting up its baton of purple bloom, and a range of sedge grass. We could hear moorhens cackling from within stands of reeds, and several shy wood ducks flew by overhead. As the fog floated off and the sun warmed the water, dragonflies darted about, and we could see fish gracefully working through the clear water. For me, used to the turbid Hudson, this view into the water was a treat.

When we reached Haven Road, which cuts across the wetland, Peter paddled across the flooded road in his boat. And though this was fun for us, for the birds of the marsh this high water is a disaster. John Haas, a local birder, had reported that many moorhen nests had been drowned, and the birds had been frantic, trying to save or rebuild their nests.

Forty-five minutes out, we circled an island, then began our return. Peter stopped paddling.  “There,” he said. He pulled out his camera, which he had been cradling between his legs, and focused. I followed the line of sight. But I couldn’t see anything. “Least bittern,” Peter said, to help me focus my gaze. Still, I couldn’t see the bird. He snapped photos, then paddled closer, the bird not moving. “Where?” I asked. Peter pointed to where I had been looking. There are times birding when the birds are invisible, when something about shape or color are elusive. This bird was unmoving, perched awkwardly in the grasses. When it came into focus, the long lines of light brown amidst green grass, I felt a rush of excitement. But soon it flew off.

As we returned toward our car, we looked again for the stinkpot on the beaver lodge. It was gone, replaced by a fat, four-foot long water snake, it’s subtle red bands weaving into the sticks of the lodge.

We pulled out onto Haven Road where John Haas was just arriving for a morning paddle. He’s the Basha Kill Birder, the man who knows and sees everything in this little paradise. We shared our sights, echoing his sights of least bitterns of a few days before. He showed us a stack of dead bowfin, left by fishermen to rot in the sun. They were about as long as my forearm, solid and sleek. Flies darted about their still bodies and something had ripped into one of the fish. “The fishermen don’t like the bowfin, so they shove a knife in their heads and leave them on the shore here,” John explained. Bowfin, apparently, eat other, more prized fish. And being a bony fish, they aren’t good eating. But the bowfin joins only the gar and the sturgeon (one of my favorite fish) as contemporaries with the dinosaurs. It’s a primitive fish, with a line of short, menacing teeth. When water is too shallow it can surface and breath through a swim bladder, which works like lungs. And there they were, a stack of dead, wondrous fish. The sadness of this left me dazed.

In the beautiful, isolated Bash my thoughts had been meandering like our own paddle. This slow time made me feel like we had been gone days, not hours.

 We loaded our kayaks onto the car, and too fast we were back in the world. We drove into Wurtsboro to have a late breakfast at Kathy’s Tea Kozy. I picked up a Post and read about Anthony Weiner buying his wife flowers. Who cares about Anthony Weiner, I wanted to ask, when a least bittern is sitting still in the grass, when stink pots are sunning on a beaver lodge, when bowfin are lying dead by the shore?

Bicknell's Thrush

The song of the Bicknell’s Thrush emerged from the spruce trees in the half light of dusk.  I stretched out in my sleeping bag and smiled. Peter and I were on the summit of Plateau Mountain . I had a pad under my bag, to keep the damp cold away. Peter had travelled even lighter, and rested without a pad on the soft ground.

“Do you realize that there are only a few acres in the world where we could hear this bird?” he asked.

The Bicknell’s thrush is a geographically particular bird, nesting only in the Northeast of this country, and only at higher elevations.  For a while, some thought it lived only on the summit of Slide mountain, the highest peak in the Catskills. It’s a bit more adventurous than that, taking to a few of the peaks in the mountains, but always over 3,500 feet. The Bicknell’s Thrush winters on Hispanola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti). It’s range map is not a swatch, but a few dots.

Since the bird sings at dusk and dawn, to hear it’s song we had to either get up extraordinarily early, and hike up a mountain, or we had to have a little overnight adventure. We chose the latter. Camping is not allowed over 3,500 feet in these mountains. But clearly others had camped here before us—trees had been cut down, and a fire pit held charred logs. But I didn’t see this as camping but rather as a nap in the open air. After all, we had no tent or stove. We had packed sandwiches for dinner, brought water and our sleeping bags. The heaviest piece of gear was Peter’s 12-pound camera. (All photos of birds here are Peter's.)

We had left the trailhead at the end of Mink Hollow outside of Woodstock around 4 in the afternoon, and followed a stream into the hills. To one side loomed Sugarloaf mountain, to the other, the long flat summit of Plateau. We were both moving slowly, stopping to drink water and talk. It was muggy-hot, and we were both sweating. At six in the evening we had arrived at a lean-to, occupied by two parties, and a sign told us we had 3.4 miles to the summit of the mountain.

 (this photo is on the summit of Plateau)

The Bicknell’s is named for Eugene Bicknell who found the bird on Slide Mountain in the late 19th century (for a while it was thought to be the same species as the Gray-cheeked thrush, but it is a separate species). It’s an unremarkable-looking medium-sized thrush.  It’s the song that makes the bird so special. John Burroughs, the early 20th century naturalist wrote about it this way: “The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was like a musical whisper of great sweetness and power.” For describing bird song, Burroughs can not be beat.

In June 2009 I wrote a blog post about trekking up Slide Mountain in the Catskills in search of the Bicknell’s thrush. That I heard the bird but did not see it left me disappointed. Some birders are happy with just a sound (and check off a bird in their life list). I need to see the birds that I hear. Early in the evening a bird perched on a limb, not more than twenty feet away. It has that characteristic plump chest of a thrush, and eyes that look big, startled.  It’s throat was speckled brown. To see such a secretive bird is thrilling.

We dozed off near 9:30 and an hour or so later, the light of the moon shining in my eyes woke me. I listened to the wind in the trees, and hoped to hear an owl—a saw whet, in particular. The temperature dropped, and I hunkered down in my sleeping bag. The smell of spruce snapped the colder air and I thought it was fall, could hear winter coming on.  It’s June, I reminded myself.

The first sound I heard on waking was a white throated sparrow. Then a winter wren, its cascading song the most beautiful in the woods. They were soon joined by the Bicknell’s flute. We sat up, a bit groggy and pulled off the slugs that paraded across our sleeping bags.

(a blackpoll warbler)

The walk along the summit of Plateau mountain is long and flat. In the early light we saw and heard the yellow-bellied flycatcher, a small bird with an olive-yellow breast. Then a blackpoll warbler. “If these boreal species are here, where are the other ones?” Peter asked. That is, where was the boreal chickadee? Or even the black backed woodpecker? One more mystery of bird life. For all that we know about birds, it seems there is infinitely more unknown. The unknown makes me happy.

Back in the parking lot at noon, we admired the butterflies—red spotted purple and white admiral—whispering along the edges of the woods before packing up and heading to town to eat ice cream.