Bryan MacKay - A Year across Maryland: A Week-by-Week Guide to Discovering Nature in the Chesapeake Region

A Year across Maryland

A YEAR ACROSS MARYLAND

A Week-by-Week Guide

to Discovering Nature in the Chesapeake Region

BRYAN MACKAY

Disclaimer: To the best of the authors knowledge, the information in this book is accurate; however, there are risks associated with consuming or using wild plants, and persons who choose to consume or use wild plants do so at their own risk. The author and publisher take no responsibility for any such risk undertaken on the basis of information contained in this book. If there is any doubt whatsoever about the identity, edibility, or safety associated with the use of a particular plant or plant part, do not ingest or use it.

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the Chesapeake Audubon Society.

2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Photographs are by the author except for those on the following pages: Scott Bauer, USDA, 203; Lavon Kara Brown, 90; William J. Hubick, 22, 53, 59, 138, 226, 258; Frode Jacobsen, 7, 13, 57, 68, 80, 101, 113, 133, 145, 153, 196, 208, 269; Debra MacKay, 66, 75, 79, 184, 225; Pamela C. Platt, 35; Hugh Simmons, 55, 64, 179, 282.

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Ive been interested in nature ever since my ecology field trips with Professor Bob Platt during college. That has now been about forty years ago. Almost a decade after college, time afield with Dr. Charley Stine introduced me to some of Marylands superb natural landscapes and habitats, many of which I revisit often and with great pleasure. And during one growing season, about 1974, I botanized with Bill Brown, the old herb man of Oella; he told wonderful stories about plants that, even if only folklore, were always engaging. More recently, I am especially indebted to the many contributors to Maryland Osprey and its successor, mdbirding, listservs chronicling observations of birds in our state; their contributors are an especially active, informative, helpful, and courteous group of naturalists.

Many other individuals provided observations or insights to me personally for this book. They include Hugh Simmons, Ruth Bergstrom, Phil Pannill, Theaux Le Gardeur, Rodger Waldman, Nick Caloyianis, Martin Gary, Tim Smith, Cynthia ORourke, Dave Curson, Esther Fleischman, Pamela Platt, Les Roslund, Sue Ricciardi, Mark Scallion, Frode Jacobsen, Kathy Woods, and Debi MacKay.

I am indebted to the many friends and acquaintances who have accompanied me during more than thirty years of exploring Maryland and adjacent states on paddling trips, hikes, photographic excursions, birding trips, bike rides, and just plain messing around in nature looking to see whats there. The list is too long, and my memory too faulty, to list everyone, but know that I have valued your companionship and benefited from your enthusiasm and camaraderie.

Several skilled photographers have very generously contributed images to this book, and to them I am immensely grateful. They include Frode Jacobsen, Bill Hubick, Debi MacKay, Hugh Simmons, Lavon Kara Brown, and Pamela Platt. These photos greatly enrich this book, and I appreciate the artistic vision of these photographers.

The Notes from the Field for September first appeared, in a slightly different version, in Canoe and Kayak in August 1999, and I am grateful to the magazine for permission to reprint it here.

A gift from Chesapeake Audubon Society to the Johns Hopkins University Press has helped bring this book to publication. I am immensely thankful to my colleagues on the board of directors of Chesapeake Audubon for this assistance.

This is my third book published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and I am thankful for the Presss willingness to believe in me and these projects. Bob Brugger and Jack Holmes have been especially encouraging, and I appreciate their support over the past twenty years. My editor for this book, Greg Nicholl, has been wonderfully supportive and has provided important advice and insight that has improved A Year across Maryland. Anne Whitmore copy edited this book, and I value her professional expertise.

Finally, I give special thanks to my wife, Debi MacKay, who has enthusiastically ventured into the field with me for the last nine years, enduring hunger, thirst, fatigue, sunburn, poison ivy, mosquitoes, and chiggers, all without complaint and always with a smile. She is simply the best.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every
purpose under the heaven.

Eccles. 3:1

King Solomon, the reputed author of the book of Ecclesiastes, got it right: there is a time under heaven, not just for every human purpose but for every natural phenomenon as well. The cycle of seasons rolls on, and those of us who love the ever-changing events of the year can barely wait for the next act in natures play. Will spring be late arriving this year? Can we find our favorite wildflower in the same location, in the same abundance, as in the past? Will autumn storms bring interesting vagrant birds to our shores? What experiences await us in our time afield; what memories will we make, alone and with friends and family, as we travel among the living things that inhabit our world? The seasons are a paradox: natural events are predictable and follow a regular pattern, yet variations are inevitable and seem capricious. Like performances of a work of good music, the notes are always the same, but how they are played is never identical.

This book is a chronicle of some of the more familiar and best-loved periodic natural events here in Maryland and just beyond the borders of our Free State. The great majority of the descriptions in this book stem from my personal experiences in the field. I kept formal field notes in 2010 and 2011, once I had formed the idea for this book. In addition, there are some idiosyncratic observancesarrivals and departures that have caught my attention over the years. Certainly some of your favorite changes in the natural world may be missing. For this I beg your forgiveness. The list is by necessity just a sampling. Neither the blooming time of every wildflower nor the arrival date of every migratory bird is included; other books and websites should be consulted for this level of detail, and some of my favorites among these resources are listed in the bibliography at the end of this book.

Attentive observers of nature will realize that the placement of natural events within a specific week is only an approximation. I have tried to assign a particular event to the week when you are