It made me mad! I simply cannot put myself into the minds of people who thoughtlessly trash and pollute our world. I cannot conceive of the idea of finishing my beer and throwing the empty can out the car window! It’s just all wrong! I guess there will always be people who make messes, and others who clean them up. This morning, I wasn’t liking mess-making people very much!

Here’s a very short list: beer and soda cans, beer bottles (broken and unbroken,) booze bottles, plastic water bottles, wrappers of all sorts, plastic bags, fast food cups, styrofoam cups, lids, straws, a shoe, a wheel, broken toys, an eyeliner, a perfume bottle, and even a used pregnancy test (one line out of two turned pink.) We filled many garbage bags.

The best part of the morning, besides the simple joy of doing something good, was hearing at least four Wood Thrushes and seeing one. They sing a beautiful song! A fine example of what we are trying to preserve.

In writing this post, as I was googling for images, I stumbled upon this North Carolina gem!

The Swat-a-Litterbug Program was designed by the NCDOT to reduce roadside littering. Clever, funny, green, and successful. I love my state!

I’ll share some pictures of a little birding trip we took this morning. We went with some of our Winston-Salem Audubon friends to Whitetop Mountain, at the westernmost tip of the state of Virginia, in the heart of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. There was a risk of thunderstorms, but we all took a chance and drove the two and a half hours to get there, and had great luck. The overcast skies kept the temperatures down, and the birds up! It poured for most of the drive back, but that was alright.

How about that view!? It was worth the trip all by itself!

Here’s Gail, looking pretty serious. Pretty and serious. But you gotta know, the birding folks we hang with are pretty serious about it!

That’s me at the far left. I fit right in with the rest of the bird nerds! LOL

The dude with the long, white ponytail at the far right is a member of the Blue Ridge Audubon group. He and his wife, right next to him, were our most gracious guides for this outing. They knew all the local scoop on what birds where.

They took us to a part of the mountain where the Appalachian Trail cuts through. It was cool to walk even a tiny portion of it. That’s Princess Gail nicely taking up the rear, with her nice rear!

We were at this spot, though, specifically to look for the Vesper Sparrow, which usually summers further north, but sometimes shows this far south at the cooler altitudes in this type of habitat. We found it!

Besides many of the regulars, we saw several other birds you don’t see every day, including Kentucky Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, and Alder Flycatcher. And we heard others that were too elusive to be seen, including Blue-headed Vireo, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Least Flycatcher, and a real treat, the beautiful song of the Veery thrush.

People who like birds tend to be naturalists in general. We frequently stop to ooh and aah about this plant, or this tree, or this bug, or this butterfly, or….

beautiful mountain flowers,

and a beaver’s home within a marshy river,

and even the man made beauty of planted Christmas trees, a classic Blue Ridge industry.

It was another awesome trip to the Blue Ridge, and we are grateful for a safe trip home in heavy rain. We are already looking forward to our next trip to this beautiful part of the world!

I have added a couple of pictures from our feeders of mother birds feeding their young. Bluebirds and Downy Woodpeckers.

The Yellow-crowned Night Heron:

Similarly, this Red Shouldered Hawk was really far away, but it’s cool to see them in the wild.

Turtles on a log:

A male and a female Eastern Towhee:

And a lovely female Bluebird:

Looking for birds is a great excuse to just be outdoors. I’m glad Gail and I share this kind of geeky interest. Now I’m tuning in more and more to the beautiful plant life in this part of the country. I’ll share some of that later.

I was limited to two cold, overcast days because of my work schedule. Bummer. Gail had the chance to spend an extra, even colder day, 29 degrees at the crack of dawn, which is the typical starting time for these events. But even so, our group spotted 40 different species on each of the two days I was there. This is less than half of the usual. Photography was also less than ideal, though I will share at least a few of my pictures of the Yellow Throated Warbler that was my favorite bird of this trip.

Here is part of our birding group at the New River Gorge, with the famous New River Gorge Bridge in the background:

The New River:

Railroads parallel the edge of the river, dating back to the time of active coal mining that started over 100 years ago. Coal mining has long since been “tapped out” in this area, which is now a protected National River.

The Yellow Throated Warbler:

Here is a picture of the famous New River Gorge Bridge. You can see a bit of the river if you look closely.

And from the bottom of the gorge:

Then she came back to protect her eggs. She was tapping loudly on the side of the bird box, telling us to scram!

Bluebirds did check the box out, as did tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees. I missed it, but Princess Gail got to see a pair of Carolina chickadees come and go with soft materials to make their nest during the course of one day. You can see a few pictures of them on Gail’s bird blog here. So we were quite surprised to find that the birds that actually occupied the nest were not the chickadees. We think they let the chickadees do most of the work, and then a tufted titmouse just took over. They are known to be aggressive nest makers. Gail posted a few pictures of the tufted titmice on the bird box here.

Now we can peek inside through the hinged roof and respectfully observe the wonders of nature, right on our own deck! Here is the mother titmouse sitting on her eggs. They typically lay 5 to 6, so we eagerly expect a hungry brood in 1 to 2 weeks!

According to a study by Alexander Wissner-Gross, PhD, physicist at Harvard University and environmental activist, an average website causes about 0.02g (0,0008oz.) of carbon dioxide for each visit. Assuming an average blog gets 15,000 visits a month, it has yearly carbon dioxide emissions of 3,6kg (8lb.). This can mainly be tracked back to the immense energy usage from (mainframe) computers, servers, and their cooling systems.

“My blog is carbon neutral” is an initiative, originally started in Germany by the “Make it Green” program, that has the goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They plant a tree for your blog and thereby neutralize your blog’s carbon footprint for the next 50 years! Everyone can make a small contribution to the environment. Every tree counts!