BBC Snippets

The month of April was a busy time for a Charlotte, NC birder and a tiny Saw-whet Owl high atop Roan Mountain along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The spring and summer of 1968 not only was busy for the birder and owl but the editorial staff of the Tennessee journal of ornithology who was scratching their heads and pondering what to do next. It continued throughout the summer and into the fall.

Dr. Lee R. Herndon, editor of THE MIGRANT who lived at Elizabethton, had opened correspondence from the birder, Marcus B. Simpson, Jr., Charlotte County Day School. Simpson had included a manuscript for a note under the title A Saw-whet Owl on Roan Mountain, and dated his correspondence April 18, 1998.

" Despite the fact that the Saw-Whet Owl has never been recorded on Roan Mountain previous to this date, its occurrence there should come as no surprise to those familiar with its habits and haunts," wrote Simpson.

His article noted that beginning at 8:20 pm. on 13 April 1968, he had listened for over an hour to the monotonous cooing notes of a Saw-whet calling from the Spruce-Fir forest of Roan High Bluff.

"The bird apparently began its calling in response to my whistled imitation of its song, a technique which has proved highly successful in locating this owl elsewhere in the southern Appalachians," he wrote in his note for publication. He went on to say that a rapidly growing body of evidence suggests that this owl may be found during the nesting season on any peak which harbors a sufficiently large forest of Spruce and Fir." In his cover letter he reported that he had found the species 23 different occasions around Brevard and Waynesville in North Carolina.

Windy conditions had prevented him from surveying the entire Roan Mountain area and he felt additional field work was needed.

Little did we know that this young birder would eventually become one of the experts on the distribution of the Saw-whet Owls in our mountains but also the author of Birds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, published in 1992 by The University of North Carolina Press.

In 1968, Simpson was preparing a paper for publication about the Saw-whets in the southern Appalachians and he was pushing the editorial staff for a publication date and issue that he could site for the Roan publication in THE MIGRANT.

Dr. Herndon sent the paper to Wallace Coffey, assistant editor, for it to be put in the correspondence to be acknowledge, placed in the copy flow for editing and consideration and eventual follow-up.

The manuscript was assigned as submission number 20 025 and a post card with the title, date received and number to acknowledge receipt. It was mailed to Simpson April 29, 1968. Simpson continued to push for a date for publication.

Herndon was skeptical and raised his eye brows. Charles R. Smith, a staff member of the journal, received another post card from Simpson earlier on April 16 and it had apparently been written a few days before but no date was entered with the correspondence. "I spent the night of April 13 on the peak and managed to call up one (and perhaps two of the owls). The bird was near Roan High Bluff and was heard from the loop road at the extreme western gardens," he wrote. He was now pushing for publication and offered that if the note could be published before the end of the season, "I will write it up with all the details."

Smith responded with a lengthy letter and sent him journal standards for "What Constitutes and Acceptable Record." He was also mailed a copy of the journal so he could familiarize himself with the style. Smith suggested these items would help with any further notes submitted to the journal and instructed him to begin corresponding with Coffey, who handled such papers.

No further manuscript arrived. Simpson wrote Coffey on July 15 and again asked when he could expect his field note to be published so he could cite it in an inclusive paper in THE CHAT, publication of the Carolina Bird Club.

The staff was skeptical of the timing and demands. Smith wanted the Tennessee journal to have a record with more documentation. Herndon didn't seem to want to act on the paper. Coffey sent a rejection note to Simpson and noted that the manuscript would not be returned, per communications with Simpson.

Charlie Smith took delight when, at a fall naturalist rally, Simpson showed up and had just heard another Saw-whet making some kind of sound upon the mountain road near Carver's Gap. Coffey no longer has a good recollection of what took place that night but knows it ended with Smith going to the site and, sure enough, there was the sound. A flash light beam was shined on the bird and it was a an American Woodcock. No one knew what to think by then.

In the cafeteria of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine hospital in Baltimore, December 1974, Coffey's brother, Dr. Donald S. Coffey a faculty member, wanted to introduce Wallace to one of their medical fellowship students who was a birder and said he knew Wallace -- it was Mark Simpson. It was small talk and a small world.

At Boone NC, Rick Knight and Coffey shared a room to participate in the annual state meeting of the Carolina Bird Club. The speaker on the night of May 8, 1992 was Mark Simpson.

With him was Dr. H. Douglas Pratt, chosen to complete the final paintings for Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Birds of the Eastern and Central United States.

Pratt helped illustrate the National Geographic Society's Field Guide to the Birds of North America and did many of the color plates as well as the Yellow-breasted Chat on the title page. He also did Mark Simpson's book, Birds of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Pratt was a scientific illustrators at the famous LSU Museum of Natural Science.

Pratt told Coffey Simpson was looking forward to signing his new book for Coffey and Pratt agreed to sign also, since he did the illustrations for Simpson's book, including the Saw-whet Owl on the title page.

A big smile spread across Simpson's face as he wrote, "Yes Wallace! There are Saw-whet Owls on Roan!"

Pratt followed his signature with a P.S. "Mark owns the Saw-whet drawing!" in reference to the title page.

Simpson wrote Coffey, Wednesday, August 9, 2006, asking him to review pages of his new and revised book on the birds of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He had not worked much on the book due to his wife having a very serious illness.

In the years following first discovery of Saw-whets on Roan Mountains, it has become the most reliable place in the region to hear and sometimes see this tiny mite of an owl which is as small as a beer can. Its soft hoots are heard at sundown near Carver's Gap in April.

From 1993 until 1995, graduate student Mark Barb of East Tennessee State University placed 16 nest boxes on the Roan. They produced five confirmed nests. On March 16, 1994, Barb found the first nest every known on Roan Mountain.

Larry McDaniel, Lorie Shumate, John Shumate, Jr. and Coffey joined Dr. Matt Rowe of Appalachian State University, his graduate students, and Mark Barb at Carver's Gap June 12, 1994 and went to that first nest to band young and gather DNA materials from the young. What an exciting and historic moment.

Coffey looked up at the mother bird perched on a branch just a few feet away and the handful of baby Saw-whets. It had been a quarter of a century since Mark Simpson found the species on Roan Mountain and the editorial staff of the Tennessee journal of ornithology just couldn't get their minds around all that at that time.

from the archives of the Bristol Bird Club

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/02-2008/msg00067.html

Perhaps the last thing that would cross your mind is that Johnny Wood, the likeable anchor of WCYB-TV's Newscenter 5 This Morning with Johnny Wood, has several years taken part in the Bristol Christmas bird count.

That is a fact many will never stumble across. Most of you know him as the morning news guy who has one of the highest rated morning newscast in America. That means he has a higher percentage of his audience during that morning time slot than any other local anchor in the country. If not now, at least for many years, no one had a higher rating.

Johnny is well known for his fishing and his fishing reports which he has probably aired constantly since he joined the WCYB-TV5 team in 1968. That may come to a close this spring because the chatter on the street has it he is retiring in May. Wow. More than 40 years in broadcasting !

He entered the bird scene as Wallace Coffey's friend since the two first met in college and in the days when he and Coffey's sister worked together in radio. Two other birders at WCYB-TV, where Coffey directed evening newscasts in the late 1960's, were very active. Among them was Roger Stone, who was with Coffey when they found Tennessee's first and only Northern Shrike in November 1964. A popular news anchor of that time, Gerry Delantonas, was also active on the bird scene. He was compiler of the Bristol Christmas Bird Count in 1967.

The BBC has always hustled to make the Bristol Christmas Bird Count more productive and enjoyable for all. So unique ways of covering the count area were adopted from unique things going on around its members.

The most early use of boats by BBC was Hank Woodward and Coffey kayaking the length of Stonemill Marsh at Abingdon with the weather blazing cold and ice hanging from all the vegetation during the Dec 30,1961 Bristol Christmas count.

The most recent is the June 14-15-16, 2002 weekend at the Rikemo Lodge of The Nature Conservancy when the BBC took nine canoes for a 9-mile birding trip down the Clinch River from Cleveland, Va. Some 19 birders took part, including Ed Talbott and Michelle Talbot who had just joined the BBC. We were great river runners until Janice Martin sank in a rapids after turning her boat over by grabbing a limb.

Snippet has accounted the club's use of boats for various events as well as field trips at South Holston Lake. We'll tell you later about boating and birding with the Bob Parker family at Watauga Lake.

Early on the BBC began using motorboats to cover South Holston Lake during the Bristol Christmas count. The first adventure was with a borrowed rental boat from Laurel Yacht Club in 1967.

In 1969 Johnny Wood joined the count and worked waterfowl from his boat on South Holston Lake. He was on the count for several years and some of the reports indicate up to 58 miles of lake and shoreline coverage and as much as 7 hours aboard the boat.

Bristol Christmas Bird Count used boats for a period of 7 or 8 years over a decade from the late 1960s into the late 1970s.

In 1976, road conditions were bad, the weather dangerous. It cleared and the sun was out on count day. Dr. Phil Shelton of Clinch Valley College at Wise, Va. flew from Lonesome Pine Airport to Bristol and provided some 40 miles of air coverage to count birds, including waterfowl. Most of us might call it harsh conditions but Shelton has vast experience flying in various types of weather in isolated and primitive wilderness. He enrolled at Perdue University in 1960 and spent years working on his Ph.D. studying beavers at Isle Royale, located in the northwest portion of Lake Superior. He had flown many trips in and out and about some 400 square miles of an area accessible only by boat or plane. He has flown widely throughout the Southern Appalachians in his private plane since he moved here. He is, perhaps, our living expert on the birds of Mount Rogers-Whitetop. He certainly has spent more time there than any birder in history.

Charlie Smith, a member of the Lee & Lois Herndon TOS Chapter in the late 1960's, applied for a grant from the Tennessee Academy of Science to experiment with aerial counts of waterfowl at Boone and Patrick Henry lakes in Sullivan County. The grant funded a winter-long series of weekly flights from Tri-City Airport using a rented plane and pilot from the Appalachian Flying Service. Coffey was a mentor to Smith and was on board for those air counts each week and helped design the project. Some of that was carried over to later BBC activities. Charlie earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University and was on the staff at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. He was the fist technical editor for the Lab's outstanding magazine Living Bird. He is still at Cornell and nearing retirement.

The use of planes to survey birds and their habitat extended itself into the 1970's with Jim Bowdoin of Bristol, a long-time member of the Tri-City Airport Commission, flying Coffey frequently on all types of air searches. Included in these were the first air survey and photos of the Slagle Creek Natural Area which is the southwestern half of Steele Creek Park in the city of Bristol.

Bowdoin also flew author Michael Frome and Coffey over hundreds of miles, including Mount Rogers-Whitetop and Roan Mountain. Frome authored two excellent books, "Strangers In High Places. The Story of the Great Smoky Mountain" (1966) and "Whose Woods These Are. The Story of the National Forest" (1962). He was the past editor of the Society of American Foresters' magazine and a columnist with Field & Stream. Jim was a star halfback for the Alabama Crimson Tied, 1954-55-56. He is well known throughout this region as an active college and high school football official.

The Bristol Herald Courier made available to Coffey, in the early 1970s, its corporate plane to survey habitat of the mountains from Roanoke to Knoxville. That was followed by the U.S. Forest Service providing its Region 8 plane from Atlanta for Coffey and Jefferson National Forest Supervisor Mike Penfold to survey areas from Bristol to Newfound Gap in the Smokies.

In the early 1970's, Dr. Fred Alsop arrived in Northeast Tennessee on the faculty of East Tennessee State University at the Kingsport Campus. A well-known birder, author, artist and lecture on birds, he soon had his own airplane which was used widely across the region, state and other parts of the country. Dr. Tom Laughlin and Rick Phillips, his students, joined him on some trips.

In the late 1990's, Dr. Jim Lapis, a gastroenterologist with Gastroenterology Associates of Bristol, offered the use of his airplane to fly Bald Eagle counts of Upper East Tennessee reservoirs each January. He flew the first trip and then his wife, Dr. Susan Lapis, flew two trips. Susan is secretary of the Asheville based SouthWings, a non-profit conservation organization that provides skilled pilots and aerial education to enhance conservation efforts across the Southeast. Susan is a 1000-plus hour instrument-rated pilot who has flown her Cessna 182 for SouthWings since 1999. She is a PhD biochemist who has worked in enzymology and cancer research. Susan has also taught various pre-med chemistry courses and still teaches in winter at the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon as a volunteer.

Jim Lapis took over for her and flew another flight or two. Among those who helped with the aerial surveys of the Bald Eagles and flew on board these flights were Larry McDaniel, Rick Knight, Dave Worley and Coffey. The data from these surveys is part of the annual mid-winter eagle counts made each year by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. The local flights for the eagles were based out of Virginia Highlands Airport and included surveys of South Holston Lake, Watauga Lake, Boone Lake, Patrick Henry Lake, the Holston River to Cherokee Dam and back to Abingdon.

When the U.S. Forest Service thought they may have evidence of a Bald Eagle nesting near Little Oak Campground on South Holston Lake but could not find a nest, Dr. Jim Lapis and Coffey flew a treetop search but nothing was found.

McDaniel will remember the cold January morning with snow on the ground and heavy frost on the wings when he stood on a step ladder and swept and brushed the frost off the wings of the Cessna 182. Jim Lapis spent nearly and hour getting the engine started on a plane that had a bad battery. Worley will never forget flying over all the devastation of flooding along the river in Carter County near Hampton where homes were widely destroyed. Nor will he forget a treetop pass below the ridge at Roan Creek on the upper end of Watauga Lake as he made video of an adult Bald Eagle perched on a branch above the water. Knight will remember discovering the Great Blue Heron nesting colony on an island in Cherokee Lake. He also photographed Orchard Bog from the air on a return trip.

In more recent years James Brooks, a staff writer with the Johnson City Press and a bird columnist, earned his pilot license and frequently flew out of the Greeneville area. James has led bird tours in many parts of the world and has been a lister and birder of much note.

From the archives of the Bristol Bird Club

Link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/bristol-birds/02-2008/msg00063.html

and the itsy, bitsy spider climbed up the spout again

My heart was beating so hard I was in a near panic attack. I began to tremble. My legs were weak. Sometimes you just close your eyes and try one more time to get yourself together. I leaned against a stone wall and slowly gathered my composure.

A minute or two before I had taken a real tumble. It was a nearly vertical free fall of almost 30 feet. Lucky for me, I had one hand on my climbing rope and was able to right myself before hitting on the shoulders of a fellow birder, who broke the fall. He was not hurt and we both lived to tell about it. He had been holding the rope from below. He looked up and saw me coming and just ducked his head and held on. There was no where to go.

Climbing to hawk and owls nests throughout the region had been one of my most satisfying endeavors. Somewhere in there one climb to a Great Horned Owl's nest near Musick's Campground at South Holston reached about 100 feet above ground.

We were always careful to have the best of equipment. Careful detail and effort was placed on safety. A professional climbing belt and such were always used. But we never had any of the modern day conveniences that young people repel with. We didn't even know there was such a thing.

It was a beautiful Sunday on April 2, 1967. Eugene E. Scott from Scott County, Charles R. Smith of Johnson City and myself had made the long climb from Va. Rt. 619 up the southwest slope of Beartown Russell mountain from Corn Valley. Carrying binoculars, camera, ropes and heavy climbing equipment, we had finally reached our goal.

Looming above us was the landmark Pigeon Rock. Local folks in the valley told us eagles had nested on the rock face. They had seen them there in previous years and thought there was a nest up there then. Some had actually seen it. It was huge -- a bulky thing on a big ledge that would be hard to reach.

We were not convinced. It sound like a Northern Raven to us. During the VSO Abingdon Foray, June 1966, C. E. Stevens and J. Watson had found ravens on Beartown Mountain.

As we crawled upon a low ledge from which we would begin our climb, the ravens were out over the slope and circling. We were convinced.

"Scotty," a man of no fear, wanted to tackle the climb without any equipment. He was middle aged and daring beyond belief. He later took a horrible fall from about 40 feet up at a Cooper's Hawk nest near his home at Nickelsville. It broke him all to pieces. He was alone and that was his first mistake. He finally crawled off the ridge and into the road near his home where his wife heard him calling and ran to help. After surgery he was on crutches and out of work for a year. His climbing came to a halt. He never really recovered from that incident.

On this day on the slope of Beartown, he took off his shoes as he like to do and began to climb the face of the big rock by putting his fingers in the crevices and bracing his feet against whatever he could. He soon made it on to the ledge and announced that it was a raven's nest and we had eggs !

He put a rope down the nearly vertical cliff face for me to come up and get measurements and photos. It was on that first attempt that something went wrong and I fell like a rock in a spring thaw.

The ledge was 32 feet and six inches high. The nest contained five eggs. The nest measured 36 inches outside diameter, 13 inches inside diameter and had an inside depth of five inches. It was nine and one-half inches high. The largest sticks were about 1/2 inch diameter and two feet long.

It contained many small pieces of bark. The inside was well lined with wool.

It was under a dominant overhang on a large ledge. There was room for two people on the ledge along with the nest.

We went back in late April or May and got photos of the nest bulging with young.

For some reason, we made no attempt to band them. For that matter, I only banded a handful of birds that year. Don't remember why.

Amazingly, I only have the color slides of the nest and young. I have no written notes and find no trace of activities from the second trip. That's not like me :-(

Let's go birding.......

Wallace Coffey Bristol, TN