This past week, my older son had a camp up in the mountains to go to near Cullowhee, NC and then was going to meet up with some other friends in the Boone, NC area. So we decided to rent some VRBOs and work from the mountains for a week so we could stay close. I had plans to visit a ton of western NC counties to plug gaps for my year effort. As usual, plans were derailed but I still managed to visit upwards of 5 new counties plus some revisiting of old ones.
However, first let me clear my backlog of local pics.
In mid-June Marty W found a Black-whiskered Vireo in downtown Beaufort and I still don't have one despite several chases, so I drove up on the weekend to give it a try. To save you the suspense, I will just spill the beans, the vireo did not show up.
Great Horned Owl fledgling. The "Old Burying Ground" cemetery in Beaufort is a tiny postage stamp of a park next to a church, but there are plenty of mature oaks in this area so it was birdy.
Adult Great Horned Owl
Great Crested Flycatcher
I basically didn't bird at all for three weeks after that, or if I did it wasn't worth mentioning and I have no pictures. Summer doldrums are slow and I didn't have enough fire in my belly for looking further afield.
Poor Paco is getting really old and I have been spending as much time as I can with him, but he is sleeping 90% of the time. It's going to break my heart when he passes.
July 4th came and I decided to celebrate by staying in and making some good eats. Italian Sausages and Buffalo meat Chimchurri Burgers with potato salad all washed down with some good Belgian beer. The kids went out to watch the fireworks but Melissa and this old grinch watched a movie and fell asleep early.
Fast forward to this past week... We started out on Friday night and drove up to Charlotte and stayed in a hotel overnight so we didn't have to drive the whole 6 hours in one sitting. Saturday morning I convinced the family to visit some parks on the way and hit up a couple counties. The big problem though is that my teenagers take hours to get ready... We didn't get to McDowell Nature Preserve in Mecklenburg County until 10:30am and it was already blazing hot with the birds going silent. The other difficult part was that we were bringing Paco with us and he is not really walking very far before he gets tired.
The only pic I came away with was this one of a couple Ebony Jewelwings getting it on. There were a few birds but nothing worth photographing.
McDowell Nature Preserve is a nice large park southwest of Charlotte and used to be one of the places where Common Ground Doves could be found in NC. Cats and other factors have basically put an end to that and the few sightings of that species in the state have been fleeting views of birds in flight somewhere close to the South Carolina border.
There are 1.1 million people in Charlotte making it the second most populous county but surprisingly you can still find some good parks and open land. There are 523 square miles in the county which making it the 38th largest in NC.
I was looking up some famous people from Charlotte and Michael Jordan was listed. That caused me to double-take because I thought he was from Wilmington, NC. A little digging and I saw he was actually born in Brooklyn NY but was raised in Wilmington where he went to High School at Laney. However, he has roots in Charlotte and owns the Hornets now.
However, here is a guy that was born in Charlotte, Billy Graham!
Billy Graham was one of the most influential American TV Evangelists ever. He died in 2018. I can't really comment on his orations because I never had the interest to listen to one, but apparently he was moving.
After a hot walk around McDowell we drove westwards and I managed one more stop, this time in Gaston County at Crowder's Mountain State Park. Paco was not really up for another walk so the family posted up under a picnic area while I explored a bit.
Disclaimer - above pic taken from google images.
Due to the heat and my family waiting in the picnic area, I was only able to hike a portion of the Pinnacle trail so I never got to take in the viewpoints. The birding was very slow until I found a nice flock including some Summer Tanagers but they stayed in the canopy and I didn't bother with pics. I definitely plan to return to this park someday and tackle the whole Pinnacle Trail.
Gaston County has 227k people and it ranks 73rd in size with 356 square miles. Here is an interesting tidbit from Wikipedia on Gaston County's natural history:
Gaston County has twelve natural heritage sites listed as being of state or regional significance. Six of these are listed because of the presence of the bigleaf magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla). This magnificent plant has the largest simple leaf of any species in the temperate world, and one of the largest flowers. Of the 34 known sites containing bigleaf magnolias in North Carolina, 29 are in Gaston County
I couldn't find any famous people who I recognized from the list.
Later that day we dropped off Luke at his camp at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee and headed to our VRBO just southwest of the college.
Our abode for the next 4 nights sat on a hill overlooking a beautiful valley about half a mile from the road so it was exceptionally quiet and peaceful.
The view from the porch. They had a nice game room with a pool table, a foosball table and a ping-pong table so George and I had some fun playing in the evenings. Unfortunately I had to work most of the time, but it was nice to take walks with Paco on the country road and listen for some of the local birds.
Song Sparrows were the most common species, but there were plenty of Red-eyed Vireos and Hooded Warblers. However, most species were quiet as they were busily taking care of young.
Melissa, George and I visited Sylva for groceries and had a nice meal at the White Moon cafe. I really liked this county, it was sparsely populated with only 40k people and is middling in size with 490 square miles. Sylva is the biggest town and its small enough to walk through in 20 minutes. Collowhee doesn't even seem to have a town, it's basically a college campus surrounded by hilly rural areas.
Most famous person from Sylva was some guy named Johnny Oates. I am not big into baseball so I had no idea.
Johnny Oates - picture courtesy google images.
One of the days we made a short visit to Judaculla Rock just outside Cullowhee. My dad was excited because this is one of the largest petroglyphs east of the Mississippi.
Pretty cool! This place is revered by the Cherokee Tribe although it is pretty old and predates the modern tribe.
The birding was decent although I only photographed this young Indigo Bunting which was begging and alerted me to its location.
Back at the VRBO, I caught this Groundhog stealing peaches from the trees on the property.
Chipping Sparrow
I will finish up our mountains trip in my next post, Melissa is reminder me we have a dinner reservation at Seabird for our 21st anniversary and I have to go!
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