Droop's Scenic State Parks
Droop Mountain boasts three state parks, spectacular views, many ghost sightings, a well-documented history, and wonderful flora and fauna. Here are a few notes and links, but bear in mind, I've barely scratched the surface.
Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park
Beartown
Greenbrier River Trail
The Battle of Droop Mountain
Last Sleep: The Battle of Droop Mountain November 6, 1863 
by Terry Lowry (1996, 302 pp) is a compilation of information about the Battle of Droop Mountain, including officer biographies, troop movements, contemporary accounts of the conflict, and photographs of significant people, places, and artifacts. It represents the most complete modern treatment of the engagement.
I believe the book would be more readable if it included more commentary and evaluation of sources. For example, as an historian, how reliable does Lowry find the passages quoted from Cal Price's accounts of the conflict? The book's coordination of present day locations with Civil War events is frustrating to the reader interested in local history. Lowry quotes extensively and without comment from contradictory sources. The 1863 map and the 1928 map of the battlefield area are both inconsistent with modern maps of the area, misplacing geographic features. There is no attempt to address these discrepancies.
Despite these flaws, I am pleased to have all this information available in one place. This book is essential to anyone interested in understanding the history of the county.
Droop Mountain Natural History
Maurice Brooks on Droop Mountain
I've spent a lot of time trying to understand where Droop Mountain fits in the geology and biogeography of the Appalachians. Maurice Brooks' The Appalachians (1965) seems to place it either in the Allegheny Mountains or immediately west of it. Despite the hours I've spent with topo maps, I can't quite understand if Droop is in the Yew Pine Mountains, or between them and the Alleghenies. Despite finding Droop interesting enough to mention, Brooks never quite spells it out.
Brooks mentions an unnamed muskeg (a bog, like the Cranberry Glades) somewhere on Droop. Near Cranberry boardwalk,
Mrs. Graham Netting found an orchid rarity, Small's twayblade (Listeria smallii), not known elsewhere in Cranberry but common in a rich (and unnamed muskeg on Droop Mountain, about twenty miles away. There are other plant specialties in these southern muskegs. The one on Droop Mountain, just mentioned, has thousands of plants of netted chain-fern (Woodwardia areolata), a species associated with coastal plains, seemingly out of place on a 3000-foot mountain....
Brooks' The Appalachians includes a very helpful breakdown of western Virginia and West Virginia in this passage:
The westward escarpment that defines the Shenandoah Valley is called North Mountain, and with it we may again take up the course of Paleozoic geology. Old Appalachia is to the east; the Great Valley and the ridges beyond are a part of New Appalachia, where rocks are sedimentary, and where the fossil record of ancient life has been preserved. In parts of the valley, and just westward, there are outcrops that date from the...Cambrian....
North Mountain (with its counterparts north and south) marks the beginning of a distinctive Appalachian topographic province, the Ridge and Valley Province. Comparatively low but steeply abrupt ridges are arranged parallel to each other on a northeast-southwest axis. Between these ridges are streams, tributaries of the Potomac River, which form a trellised drainage pattern....
Just over a hundred miles west from Washington, the Alleghenies rise abruptly one or two thousand feet above the Ridge and Valley Province. This escarpment marks the beginning of a new topographic province. On its higher expanses it recaptures much of the northern atmosphere that occurs on Blue Ridge summits, and it introduces many new plants and animals of boreal distribution. To add further to its biological significance, it shelters surprising numbers of plant and animal endemics. Greatest elevations normally occur along the axis ridge known as Allegheny Backbone, but there are also extensive areas above 4000 feet on such westward ridges as Cheat, Gauley, and Back Allegheny.
Along higher Allegheny crests there is a southward extension of the red spruce forest, so typical of Maine and New Brunswick. Here hermit and Swainson's thrushes nest, red crossbills occur at all seasons, and varying hares, brown in summer and white in winter, reach their farthest southward limits. Visitors will soon come to recognize the loosely cemented sand and coarse gravel, geologically Pottsville conglomerate, which outcrops on many of the higher Allegheny peaks. Another characteristic Mississippian formation is Greenbrier limestone, holding within its depths many of the caves which we shall be discussing in a later chapter. Some of Appalachia's finest ferns are at home on these limestone ledges.
Between high Allegheny ridges and the prairies of interior America is a region of eroded hills, which are dissected by streams that flow in almost every possible direction and then are finally drawn to the Ohio River. So broken and irregular is the topography that it takes close looking to see this area as a plateau, but actually the hilltops maintain remarkably even elevations. This is the Appalachian Plateau, with outcrops that date from the Pennsylvanian Period to the east and from the Permian to the west, where hills run out and the level lands begin.
Within Pennsylvanian formations are some of the richest coal beds the world holds. The Pittsburgh coal seam has often been called, and with justification, "the world's most valuable mineral deposit." This and other coal seams have profoundly affected the habitance and economy of the region, since the mining of coal is ever an ugly and destructive process. Still, there are forests in the coves, remarkably rich and varied ones, with trees that suggest regions farther north or farther south.
pages 13-17
In the Garden
July, 2005. I took photos because this was the best-tended, best-weeded garden I'd ever been a party to. I've been thinking about how words mean different things to different people. This fenced-in vegetable patch comes to mind of when I hear the word "garden." In England, the thing people call the "garden" is all the cultivated ground surrounding a house. I was continually confusing people there by praising their beautiful backyards. (I wonder what that conjured up for them.)
As a child, I was fascinated by the hymn "In the Garden." I assume, now, that the author pictured, and meant us all to picture, an English-style garden. I called the thing pictured above a garden. I knew the roses mentioned in the hymn must have been in a nearby flower bed.
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear,
Falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
I imagined Jesus getting soft garden dirt in his sandals as he carefully stepped over the row of beans, the row of tomatoes, into the cucumber patch....Everybody likes a nice garden, and the Lord would surely not step on good produce.
Multicolored Asian Lady Beetles and the Black Helicopters
August, 2005. I was cleaning out the pantry the other day, making room for my newly filled pint jars of calico relish, spaghetti sauce, and tomato preserves, when I swept up the carcasses of a dozen lady bugs. If I'm lucky I will finally sweep out the last dead lady bug from last year the day they start coming in the house in the fall.
The problematic insect in question is the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle. It looks rather sweet in this photo. You don't see the 10,000 other lady bugs that were swarming over my house, last October, looking for a crack to crawl in. These critters are exotics, their populations unchecked by predators and disease, and in the fall they aggregate and fly in big clouds. I was driving over Kennison mountain last fall on a beautiful, sunny day when I drove smack into one of these swarms. I had to pull over and wash off the foul-smelling haemolymph so I could see to drive. In the winter, the little darlings treat you to a whiff of this stuff whenever you brush against one as it crawls on your computer, around your lamp, on your furniture, up your nose....They also bite.
The extension fact sheets from Penn State and Cornell differ on whether these critters were intentionally or accidentally introduced. Some people in Pocahontas County favor a conspiracy theory, in which people heard planes fly over, and were immediately pelted by a rain of lady bugs. Here on Droop Mountain, we've watched swarms come down like rain, without benefit of planes, black helicopters or other interventions.
Manduca sexta
Labor Day, 2005 was a good day for caterpillars. I found a couple of these sphingids ignoring the tomatoes and potatoes and chowing down on a solanaceous weed. These fellows grow up to be sphinx moths, sometimes called hummingbird moths because they resemble hummingbirds in size, shape, and behavior. I'm not a big lepidopteran fan, but I always enjoy these big moths.
As an insect taxonomist, I'm always reluctant to slap a specific epithet on an insect if I haven't checked the key characters. I'm reasonably certain that these critters were tobacco hornworms (Manduca sexta), but I didn't grab them and check the keys. I confess I also failed to identify the host plant by examining floral characteristics. The worms ate that part of the homework, so I can't tell you if they were on nightshade, or on some Physalis species.
Pipevine Swallowtail
Labor Day, 2005 Phoresis. That's what this caterpillar was experiencing as I photographed him. I found him tearing across my porch at top speed, and nudged him onto my finger and then on to the pear tree for a short photo session. He was in a hurry. When these large caterpillars are about to pupate, they become restless, leave the plants where they've been feeding and start looking for a safe place to dissolve into a morphogenic soup and reassemble into a winged creature. Phoresis is movement from place to place, as in electrophoresis (where molecules migrate differentially through a gel in response to electrical current).
I was particularly pleased to see this fellow, because he answered a question that's been on my mind since I moved here: Are those irridescent butterflies I see so often Pipevine Swallowtails or Spicebush Swallowtails? I haven't been able to find either Aristolochia or spicebush anywhere around here, but the butterflies are abundant. The caterpillars of the two species are nothing alike, and this fellow is definitely a Pipevine Swallowtail. That's Battus philenor, (Linnaeus) as near as I can tell. (I got it off the Internet, not from an authoratative text.) While trying to figure out the correct genus name (My old books here at the house use Papilio.), I found these interesting Web sites.
- Pipevine Swallowtail Biology for kids. Really nice links to other species in the ecosystem.
- A distribution map for the Pipevine Swallowtail.
- A few paragraphs on Mullerian mimicry and the complex to which the Pipevine Swallowtail belongs.
- A nice photographic comparison of different American swallowtail butterflies, and their larvae.
Addendum: After I posted this, I saw that Fred of Fragments from Floyd had posted his own swallowtail larva photo. His caterpillar sat tight. Evidently it was done with phoresis.
Arachne in the Garden
Labor Day, 2005 was also a good day for spiders, too. This beauty was hunting on a patch of goldenrod.
Deer Season's Greetings, 2005
November, 2005 In Pocahontas County, deer season is a bigger holiday than Christmas, even for kids. The schools are closed for the week, and, at least briefly, it supersedes video games and Barbie dolls. The hardcore among us have already been hunting with bows, and we have all been talking about the weather and the deer population for weeks. We generally agree that we need some snow, that the population is down, and the bucks are keeping themselves scarce.
This weekend, people who grew up here and moved away to find work have come back to hunt deer with their families. Home places and hunting camps that stand empty most of the year are occupied now, and the festivities will continue throughout the week. Thanksgiving dinner will be a disappointment if it consists chiefly of grocery store turkey. (Wild turkey is a different story--I mean the bird, not the beverage.) The crowd we run with plays traditional Appalachian stringband music, and we've had two late nights picking so far.
At our house, we eat deer meat about three times a week throughout the year, so food preservation is the order of the day. Our division of labor gives me the garden and orchard canning chores, which are finished for the year. Now I get to enjoy deer liver (by far the most delicious, delicately-flavored liver I've ever had), tenderloin, and steaks. We will freeze some steaks and roasts, and pressure can the rest. We are fortunate to have such high quality meat, with no hormones, antibiotics, or factory-farm bred diseases. As a former farm girl, I feel as if I'm cheating, because I didn't have to feed the deer, vaccinate them, or sit up with them all night when they were having their babies.
As recently as the 1970's, whitetailed deer were fairly scarce in Pocahontas County. However, it looks as if our days of abundant, low-cost, high quality wild meat may be numbered. Chronic Wasting Disease, long a problem out West, has been reported in four deer in Hampshire County, West Virginia, and I think DNR's talk about controlling it is a pipe dream. After seven years of reading and writing about microbial pathogens, I'm quite pessimistic about our ability to affect the spread of infectious diseases in animals or humans.
Milkweeds
Inflorescences
With the departure of the snow, I'm noticing all the opened milkweed seedpods along the roadsides and at the edges of my yard. It has me thinking about how they looked in July. They are such strange plants, oozing sticky bitter sap like Elmer's glue when you try (always unsuccessfully) to pull them out of your garden. These strange, fleshy flowers, the color of bruises, trap nectar-seeking insects by the leg. When the butterfly or wasp pulls its leg free, it drags out the pollinium, a pollen-filled ankle bracelet. Smaller, frailer insects, such as ants, can't extricate themselves, and they die like foxes in leghold traps.
My plant taxonomy professor told us that Linnaeus named these strange flowers Asclepias syriaca because he felt sure the North American herbarium specimens he received must have been mislabeled. The downy stems, the fleshy leaves and seed pods, these were clearly xeric adaptations found in desert plants. He opted for syriaca rather than the canadensis or virginica he used for so many North American species.
As usual, I've found a few interesting links, which I submit for your consideration.
- Duke Handbook of Energy Crops
- Wild Flowers and Plants of North Carolina
- Edge of the Prairie: A Sand County Today
- Photographs and descriptions of the flowering and non-flowering plants of Missouri, USA
Monarch Butterflies
I never pass a milkweed plant (unless I'm driving a car--I draw the line at braking for roadside weeds) without looking on the undersides of its upper leaves. Since I moved to Pocahontas County in 1999, my search has been in vain, until this past summer. I never found eggs, but this August, I discovered plenty of these handsome Monarch caterpillars. I don't know what was different this year.
When I was about fourteen, I discovered that you could pluck your milkweed with Monarch egg, bring it into the house, stick it in a Coke bottle filled with water, and, over the next two weeks, watch the caterpillar hatch, and grow, and munch away at the leaves. As the leaves disappear, you can move the caterpillars (I kept finding more) onto freshly picked plants. You need to sweep up the frass on the tabletop pretty often, but then the caterpillars pick a place to pupate, and you get to watch them split their skin down the back one last time, to reveal a translucent, green and gold chrysalis, which squirms itself into shape, and holds still. It's not long before the chrysalis turns black and orange, splits open again, and out crawls the long-legged, tiny-winged butterfly. It pumps up the tiny wings, gets nice and dry, and needs to be let outdoors.
I'm reasonably certain that kids today don't ever have this much fun.
Milkweed Ladies Sail Away
Long before I was first entranced by milkweeds, Louise McNeill invited them to tea, and wrote them her first poem. In The Milkweed Ladies (1988, University of Pittsburgh Press), a brief but vivid memoir of a Pocahontas County childhood, McNeill relates the poem she composed as a child for her playhouse tea parties, where her guests were made of milkweed pod fluff:
Milkweed ladies so fair and fine,
Won't you have a sip of my columbine?
Or a thimble of thimbleberry wine?
Nobody has described Pocahontas County more lovingly or more vividly than Ms. McNeill.
Mushroom Club: Save a Little Bit for the Coroner
I was cleaning off my desk the other day (to make room for quilting project overflow) when I found the application form for "Membership in the New West Virginia Mushroom Club." A friend gave it to me about 18 months ago, but something has kept me from writing a check and sending it in. Perhaps this quote from the "Disclaimer" section will explain my reluctance. It occupies at least a quarter of the printed matter on the application form.
...There is always the possibility that you can get sick or die after eating a mushroom, even if you have safely consumed the exact same genus, species and variety before. No matter what the cause, if you do get sick or die after eating a mushroom or after eating a prepared dish made available at a mushroom foray, it's not the fault of the attendees at the foray, the club, or the club's members or officers. The club has no control over the identification of mushrooms or other foods prepared by foray attendees and it's possible that a dish can be labeled as containing one or more mushrooms that were misidentified by the chef. Also, be aware that, after our foray mycologists identify a specimen and place it on a plate on the foray exhibition tables, that does not necessarily mean that the mushroom you see on the plate is the same mushroom labeled on the identification tag. We have seen instances where foray attendees pick up and study a specimen and then inadvertently return it to the wrong dish on the table. So a specimen placed on a dish labeled as a species that is edible may not necessarily be the same mushroom the mycologist initially identified and placed on that plate. Also, some specimens may not have been identified by the foray mycologists, but by enthusiastic, but mistaken, amateurs hoping to help out. For these reasons, you should always identify mushrooms to your own satisfaction before cooking or eating them. Finally, please use sensible precautions before eating any mushroom, even if you feel certain about its identity: eat only a small amount and save a specimen for analysis by personnel in the emergency room, hospital laboratory or coroner's office.
I confess we eat wild mushrooms whenever we find them, and never save a specimen for analysis by personnel in the coroner's office.