Greetings, naturalists.
It is indeed a new semester, chock-full of time and opportunity. Thus begins a historic several months in the celebration of the natural history of Tennessee's tableland and all other things jaw-dropping.
The Society kicked off this school year's exploits with a rendezvous on the windy waters of Woods Reservoir for a sunset voyage of paddle and binocular. We intrepidly canoed out to a small nitrogen-waylaid island of ambitious trees that serve as a rookery for the noisiest and most farty of wading birds and their swarming tagalong passerine friends. Bird count for the expedition includes, but is not limited to:
Yellow-crowned night heron
Cattle Egret galore
Little Blue Heron
Great Egret
The notorious Mr. Mallard
Red-Winged Blackbird
Osprey (displaying fabulous diving skills)
Double-crested cormorants
Starlings, thousands of starlings.
Perhaps the most glorious sight of this sunset-drenched canoeing trip was the morphous amoeba-like swarms of flying starlings that would darken certain blocks of sky with staggering flock-shapes and derring-doo.
On a non-ornithological note, the entirety of the drive back took place within the usual summer-mist of lepidopterans (most notably of the geometridae), neuropterans, and other nocturnal pterogytes of the warm August fields. The insects are out in full force, especially after our recent rains. The SNH Society has begun to respond in kind to the climatic and ecological events at hand. Now is the time to spread wings and fly, to empathize with bird and moth and get OUT THERE. Here's to a new semester!
Yours,
EMKeen, Patrician
