The irises my wife, Elizabeth, cultivates in our yard are coming into full bloom as I write this. Their shapes and colors and fragrances are almost too intricate to describe.

The name iris, meaning rainbow, was given to the group of flowers so-called because of their varied and subtle colors. Some also know them as “fleur-de-lis” (flower-of-Louis) because the crusader Louis VII selected an iris as his family emblem. And many also know them as “blue flags” for the obvious reason that the blue varieties seemingly hold forth their stately blooms like flags in a parade. By any name, the irises we encounter here in the southern mountains are among our most showy and interesting wildflowers.

To my knowledge, five iris species have been reported from the Smokies region: dwarf-crested iris (Iris cristata), slender blue flag (I. prismatica), yellow flag (I. pseudacorus), dwarf iris (I. verna), and southern blue flag (I. virginica). Northern blue flag — the largest of the blue-colored species (I. veriscolor) — grows wild only as far south as Virginia in the mountains.

Three of these species are commonly encountered. Dwarf-crested iris, which grows in rich woodlands, is no doubt the most common. The four-inch high plants literally carpet the ground in places from April into May, and can be observed flowering on into June in the higher elevations. Dwarf iris resembles dwarf- crested iris but is slightly taller, has a less conspicuous crest on its sepals and narrower leaves, and favors dry, rocky woodlands. My favorite species is southern blue flag, which grows about two feet high and displays a yellow blotch at the base of each sepal. It appears in marshes and along stream banks.

The next time you encounter an iris growing in the wild, take time to observe the plant closely. You’ll find that it has devised an ingenious floral architecture that virtually prohibits self-pollination, thereby insuring a more vigorous and robust population.

Bumblebees are the primary iris pollinators. They can land only on the outer tip of the horizontal sepals. The colorful lines, crests, or blotches on the inner part of the sepal are called “nectar guides.” They have the same purpose as the lights on an airplane runway; that is, they guide the insect toward the nectar located at the base of the flower.

To get there, a bumblebee must first push under the upturned female parts. If there is pollen on the insect’s back from another iris, it will be deposited on this stigma and the setting of fruit will occur via cross-fertilization. Once past the female part, a bumblebee must rub its back against the pollen-bearing male part before reaching the nectar source.

After feeding on iris nectar, bumblebees normally slip out of the side of the flower through special openings. But even if the insect exited the way it entered, its back won’t touched the upturned female part because of the way it’s tilted. But the stigma of the next iris it enters from the front will be dusted with the pollen on its back. Any opportunity for self-fertilization is virtually eliminated.

The wildflower colors and shapes and fragrances we seek out and admire for their aesthetic values are in every instance the result of long-term relationships with various pollinators: beetles, flies, bumblebees, hummingbirds, gnats, etc. The old adage that “form follows function” is nowhere more true. It follows that the more closely we observe the specific interrelationships wildflowers have with pollinators, the more fully we can appreciate floral architecture.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

As a struggling albeit brilliant writer, Gary Carden never turns down money.

So when an out-of-town man in a rental car appeared on Carden’s front porch offering a $1,000 down payment on the spot to write a play about Horace Kephart, Carden wasn’t about to say no. Carden was curious, however, what led the man to Sylva.

“He said ‘I’m told you are a remarkable playwright.’ Right away I was suspicious,” Carden recounted. When the man went so far as to call Carden “well-thought of,” it sealed that suspicion.

“I knew he was doing a snow job. I am not well thought of. I am eccentric and peculiar, so I said ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’” Carden said.

The man on his porch, Daniel Gore, was part of a growing cult of Kephart followers who have elevated the famed writer to folk hero status for his chronicles of early mountain culture. Gore, a musician, had written a collection of songs, called “Ways That Are Dark,” to accompany Kephart’s popular book, Our Southern Highlanders. Gore thought his CD would be the perfect soundtrack for a play, and he wanted Carden to write it.

Carden — who said he “owed everybody in the county” — took the man’s money and promptly went to town and paid bills and bought groceries. That night, he got to work on the play. An obsessive and incessant writer, Carden quickly churned out an opening scene. He cast aside the idea of fitting the play to the CD, but instead began writing a play about Kephart’s life.

Carden was no stranger to Kephart. As an authentic keeper of mountain culture, Carden has studied Kephart extensively. He finds fault in some of Kephart’s portrayals of mountain people. Carden sees Kephart as an “outlander” — someone who isn’t from the mountains but lays claims as an expert anyway — and proceeded to make that the name of his play.

Carden emailed the opening scene of Outlander to Gore, who soon reappeared on Carden’s porch. The scene simply wouldn’t do, Gore said.

Rather than a hero, Carden’s play portrayed Kephart as a drunken, broken man seeking a refuge from society in the Smoky Mountains, a “back of beyond,” as Kephart himself called in. By all accounts, Carden’s scene is exactly how Kephart arrived in the region. Kephart was famous among locals not for his writing that earned him so many accolades on the national stage, but for being a drunk. Gore wanted no part of that in his play, however.

“I told him ‘You can’t write about Horace Kephart without mentioning he drinks.’ It is the flaw that makes the man admirable. If he was perfect he would be boring as hell,” Carden said. “He was flawed, and it’s what makes people identify with him.”

Gore stood his ground.

“He said, ‘Try again,’ and left another check for $1,000,” Carden said.

After another trip to town for groceries — and a spending spree at the book store — Carden came home and got to work on the next scene. He emailed it to Gore, who once again balked.

“He said Kephart in the play has too many flaws,” Carden said. “I said ‘I am the playwright, you are the musician. I say this is a good play.’”

Carden told Gore if he was looking for was a “candy box” to wrap around the 12 songs of his CD, then Carden wasn’t his man. But Carden didn’t give up on the idea of a play on Kephart.

“I thought. ‘Hell I am going to write that play he didn’t want,’” Carden said.

As Carden toiled over the play, a strange thing happened. He started to like Kephart more and more. Carden once held Kephart in mild disdain. When Kephart fled his former life in St. Louis to hide out in the Smokies, he left a wife and six children behind. Throw in alcoholism and exploiting mountain people for book material, and Carden had plenty to hold against Kephart.

But Carden’s thoughts on Kephart softened as he climbed inside Kephart’s head to write the play.

“I will, just like any true native who lives here, grudgingly give Kephart his due,” Carden said.

Kephart’s tireless fight for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is ultimately what won Carden’s respect. The park’s creation was a long uphill battle, and Kephart’s role as an advocate was integral to its success. Kephart loved the mountains and was willing to fight for them, and Carden saw that.

“He was a catalyst that made things happen. That stubborn persistence that he would get up and go on, get up and go on,” Carden said.

Many people around Bryson City were against a national park that would claim their homes and land. They didn’t take kindly to Kephart’s advocacy for such a thing.

“Common sense tells you it must have hurt him deeply when people turned against him,” Carden said.

Half way through the play, Carden quit writing, however. It wasn’t unusual.

“I have a house full of plays I never finished,” Carden said.

In this case, Carden realized people might not want to face a humanized Kephart, a Kephart who wasn’t a folk hero but a just a man with his share of flaws.

“I realized, ‘Hell people would not let me do this play.’ So I shelved it,” Carden said.

But a couple years ago, Carden decided to resuscitate it.

“The hardest part was the last two pages. They took me six months,” Carden said. As Carden recited the ending from memory — a moving soliloquy beside Kephart’s grave on the hillside above Bryson City — Carden’s eyes misted up a bit.

Carden is still hunting for a home for his Kephart play. He has approached the Smoky Mountain Community Theater in Bryson City and Western Carolina University theater department, as well as several others, but so far has not found any firm takers.

While George and Elizabeth Ellison are fixtures in Bryson City today — Elizabeth as a renowned artist and George as a writer and naturalist — their journey to the region 30 years ago was little more than happenstance.

The Ellisons rode in on the back-to-the-land movement, setting up house and raising a family in a rural cabin lacking running water or electricity. While it was ultimately a lifestyle that fit them perfectly, they landed here initially while on a quest of a different sort.

George Ellison first set foot in Bryson City in 1976, partly on a writing assignment and partly on a personal pilgrimage to the old stomping grounds of Horace Kephart, a famed writer who immersed himself in the culture of backwoods mountaineers a century ago. Kephart’s writing chronicled the distinct mountain culture and dialect and described the wilderness landscape — a rich subject matter than catapulted him onto the national stage as an outdoors adventure writer.

Ellison was commissioned to research the life of Kephart and write an introduction for a reprint of Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. While Ellison had long been enamored with Kephart’s writing, he landed the assignment somewhat by luck. Ellison was teaching at Mississippi State University in the mid-19070s when small talk at an English Association meeting arrived on the subject of Kephart.

A visiting scholar from the University of Tennessee Press was in the room, and like Ellison, was a Kephart follower. A reissue of Our Southern Highlanders had been percolating in the background, but hinged on finding someone to write an introduction that would set the stage for the new printing.

“We got to talking and he said, ‘Gosh, I found someone with an interest in Kephart. Can you do the introduction?’” Ellison recalled.

Ellison gladly, but skeptically, accepted. Kephart’s life had largely been an enigma. Little was known about the man before he abruptly appeared in Swain County and settled amongst the people there. Kephart had left few clues of his own.

“I thought it would be a situation where I couldn’t find enough to write an introduction. All I’d found before was a couple book reviews and a little sketch of his life,” Ellison said. “No one had done a coherent depiction of his life before he came here.”

Kephart was a major player in the movement to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so one of Ellison’s first moves was to seek out the park’s historian and archivist, Don DeFoe.

“I walked in and said ‘Does anyone here know anything about Horace Kephart?’ and his eyes lit up. It was like he’d been waiting for me for years,” Ellison said.

DeFoe led Ellison downstairs to the basement of park headquarters outside Gatlinburg, Tenn., and opened the door of a damp storage room.

“There were boxes of Kephart stuff molding away, all this stuff was sitting there rotting away,” Ellison said of the room, which had visible water leaks.

Along with boxes of Kephart’s prized journals, containing meticulous notes on everything from local dialect to plant uses, were many of Kephart’s personal items.

Ellison’s quest to piece together Kephart’s life soon led him to a host of closet Kephart fans, each eager to share what they could.

“I felt like a little Dutch boy running around sticking my finger in the dike,” Ellison said. “It was overwhelming, because I had a project where I didn’t know what I was going to write about and suddenly I had more than enough.”

Ellison’s research ultimately revealed the life and times of Kephart and postulates on the motives that precipitated his move to live among the mountaineers.

“No one knew his story until I put it together, not in that kind of detail and context,” Ellison said.

Ellison’s own writing career was launched on the coattails of Kephart. The introduction earned him instant recognition and esteem with exactly the audience that Ellison was suited for, an audience as enthralled with the mountain landscape and cultural history as Ellison was.

In recent years, Kephart has been transformed from a nearly forgotten historical figure to a folk hero of sorts.

Ellison helped facilitate a transfer of the national park’s Kephart materials to Western Carolina University, which provided a proper archival repository for the valuable historical collection both in the Hunter Library Special Collections and Mountain Heritage Center.

Ellison spent a lot of time in Bryson City researching Kephart, enough to realize the town could give him and his wife, Elizabeth, the lifestyle they were looking for.

“She wanted to paint full time and not be pigeon-holed as a professor’s wife. I always wanted to be a writer,” Ellison said. “I said ‘Bryson City is really a nice little town. Let’s give it a shot.’”

Ellison denies that he set out to be a modern-day Kephart.

“I didn’t come here because I fell in love with Kephart. I came here because I fell in love with the region,” Ellison said.

Numerous non-native plants have been introduced into the southern mountains during the last century or so. Many of these are now classified by wildlife biologists as “exotic pests.” Few would argue that kudzu does not fall into that category. And without doubt, the most notable alien mammal ever introduced here was the European wild boar.

There are friends of the wild boar — mostly hunters — who believe that the animal’s outstanding qualities as a game animal outweigh its negative qualities. Then there are those who have observed its capacity to devastate large areas that think otherwise.

I used to be a friend of the wild boar. Its survival instincts and ability to adapt to truly rugged backcountry seemed to me to be admirable traits in any animal. In recent years, however, after some up close and personal encounters, I’ve changed my mind.

A 29-page pamphlet by Perry Jones entitled “The European Wild Boar in North Carolina” (North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, 1959) tells the story of how the animal arrived and subsequently flourished in this region of the world. In 1908, the Whiting Manufacturing Co., an English concern, purchased Hooper Bald and adjoining lands near Robbinsville in Graham County. George Gordon Moore, an adviser to English investors, was allowed to establish a 1,600-acre game preserve on Hooper Bald in return for assisting the company with floating a loan of two million dollars.

Beginning in 1912, the preserve was stocked with eight buffaloes, 14 elk, 6 Colorado mule deer, 34 bears (9 of which were Russian brown bears), 200 wild turkeys, 10,000 English ring-neck pheasant eggs, and 13 wild boars. Area residents have long referred to the wild boar as the Russian (or “Roossian”) wild boar, but Jones speculates that they actually came from Germany. At any rate, they were the only ones to escape from the preserve and survive in the surrounding mountains.

“One source states that the wild boar were capable of sticking their legs between the rails of their pen and actually climbing over the fence,” Jones reported. “It seems likely, however, that the majority of them chose to remain within the enclosure where they were allowed to reproduce unmolested for a period of eight to ten years. The first time Moore and his guests set dogs on the animals, the boar leaped over low places in the fence rail, and took off for the horizon.”

Established in 1934, the 520,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park has become their prime sanctuary despite extended shooting and trapping campaigns by the park service to eradicate them because of their destructive habits. A mature animal can attain a height of over three feet at the shoulder and a weight of over 400 pounds. The average weight, however, is probably less than half that.

They vary in color from pale gray to brown to black. The most striking one I’ve ever seen was a young charcoal black sow weighing perhaps 170 pounds that broke into my wife’s fenced garden plot last summer. When Elizabeth started shouting at the beast to go away, the startled sow spooked and commenced bouncing off of the hog wire fencing like a billiard ball before finally escaping. The fence was a wreck. It looked like a small tank had hit into it on all four sides.

Roaming widely in herds, they are omnivorous, feeding on plant matter and small animals like salamanders. The head of the wild boar is wedge shaped with a pointed snout, which enables it to root up the ground seeking underground tubers in search of food.

Troy Hyde, a veteran Graham County hunter, told Jones that one could “root up concrete, if he put his mind to it.”

That sounds like exaggeration until you see areas where they have been rooting. The first time I encountered such an area I momentarily wondered what fool had been rototilling a mountainside. Then the hog smell betrayed the culprits’ identities. I was astonished at the extent of damage. But just how destructive they are didn’t really hit home until several years ago when they came onto our property — which adjoins the national park several miles west Bryson City — and went to work digging up the richest wildflower area we have. (They especially love the tubers of the showy spring species: bloodroot, trillium, rue anemone, blue cohosh, trout lily, etc.) When we returned home after a two-week absence, my first thought again was that some fool had rototilled the slope behind the house. Then I smelled that smell and saw the hog tracks.

At that time we had to temporarily discontinue using our gravity-flow water system because the critters decided to root and wallow in the watershed up on the ridge above the house. North Carolina wildlife officers issued us an out-of-season hunting permit to help remedy the problem — but I didn’t have enough firepower to make a stand. The pellets from my 12-gauge shotgun would have only tickled a boar’s funny bone. I never even fired a shot. After awhile, they upped and left on their own. Good riddance, we thought.

But alas, they returned again while Elizabeth and I were away teaching for a week. That time they attacked a partly buried rock wall above our house. The 60-foot long wall had been built in the early part of the 20th century by a farmer clearing the land to plant corn. We suppose there was something living in or under the wall that the wild boar craved. The hillside looked like several grenades had been detonated under the wall, throwing rock debris helter-skelter.

Wild boars are independent cusses that have made the transition from one continent to another with admirable ease. They didn’t asked to be hauled from Europe to Graham County, but they’ve made a go of it without any whining. But you can’t really be the friend of an animal that pollutes your water supply, uproots rock walls on your property, and decimates the fencing around your wife’s vegetable garden. Even kudzu doesn’t do that.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I’m sometimes asked if the prehistoric Cherokees used any sort of poisons on their blowgun darts. These darts (slivers of black locust, hickory, or white oak) were from 10- to 20-inches long with thistledown tied at one end to form an air seal in the blowgun (a hollowed piece of cane cut to a length of 7 to 9 feet). The Cherokees were accurate with these weapons up to 40 or 60 feet, especially when shooting birds, but there is no evidence they used poisons of any sort on their darts.

They did, however, routinely employ poisons from several native plants when fishing. The drugging of fish was practiced during the dry months of late summer and early fall when water flow in mountain streams is often low, thereby creating a series of small pools with high concentrations of fish.

The two plants commonly used to stupefy fish were yellow buckeye (Aesculus octandra) and goat’s rue (Tephrosia virginica), which is also known as devil’s shoestring or catgut.

Buckeye nuts were ground up and thrown into the pools of water. The poison thereby released was aesculin. This toxin caused the fish to float to the surface where they were easily collected and thrown up on the bank in long-handled baskets made for that purpose. I do not know if the aesculin posed a risk to humans eating the fish.

Goat’s rue is still common in open or waste areas throughout the old Cherokee country. Easily recognized as a member of the Pea Family by its pinnate leaves that bear 17-29 leaflets, the silky-hairy plant (1-2 feet high) displays bi-colored, irregularly shaped flowers (yellow base, pink wings) throughout the summer.

The Cherokees and other Indian tribes in the southeastern United States collected goat’s rue and ground it up on posts resting on the bottom of a pool. Shortly after the ground plant materials fell into and saturated the water, paralyzed fish would float to the surface for collection. The toxic substance in goat’s rue is rotenone, which is the principal ingredient in various insecticides and modern fish poisons. By attacking the nervous system of the fish, rotenone did not poison the meat in any way.

The prehistoric Cherokees also speared fish, caught them with lines and bone hooks, shot them with bows and arrows, and grabbed them with their bare hands. But their most productive tactic involved the use of the rock weirs and fish traps. Located throughout the southern mountain region wherever the Cherokees located their large villages alongside major streams, these devices allowed for huge quantities of fish to be taken at one time.

Weirs were constructed where the water was swift. Two converging, wall-like alignments formed a V-shape. Facing downstream, the V-shaped structure funneled fish into a wicker or log trap. Harvesting the fish swept into the traps was a piece of cake.

(One of the most accessible of these ancient rock weirs is located alongside N.C. 28 about five miles north of Franklin across from the Cowee Gift Shop. This trap was maintained by white families who lived in the area into the 1930s, when the state outlawed the practice.)

However they procured them, the Cherokees prized fish like catfish that — with their skins still attached — could be easily smoked and dried so as to provide a supply of protein during the long winter months.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the Smokies region, there are three species of dogwood. Everyone is familiar with flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), which is starting to flower this week, but the others are less well known.

Alternate-leaved or pogada dogwood (C. alternifolia) is the only alternate-leaved dogwood in North America. It’s a small tree (15-25 feet tall) that grows in rich woods, producing greenish-white flowers in late spring and handsome dark blue-black fruits on reddish stems in late summer. Frequent at all elevations, it is perhaps more common in the middle to higher elevations

Silky dogwood (C. amomum) is a coarse shrub that grows in marshes or along stream banks. Its whitish, relatively flat flower heads appear in mid-spring. The fruit turns black as the season progresses.

If the cardinal is the signature bird of the southeastern United States, flowering dogwood is the signature tree. It is so widely admired that numerous cultivated varieties have been developed, including the popular pink “rubra” form.

Pause to take a closer look this spring at a dogwood inflorescence. Numerous tiny yellow flowers, each bearing four petals, will be clustered at the center. This cluster will be bordered by four large petal-like bracts. These shining white bracts, which can be seen from afar, serve the same purpose as petals — they attract insects to the tiny flowers that gather nectar and, in the process, pollinate the tree.

In just about every spring identification workshop I lead there will be someone who will ask in a loud voice, “You know, don’t you, the best way to recognize a dogwood tree?” While everyone else is groaning, the same person will quickly answer, “By its bark.”

Well, a dogwood tree’s “bark” is distinctive in that it is broken into tiny squares one inch or less across. But according to one source, the common name derives from the fact that the inner bark was once used to make a strong medicine for washing sick dogs. And according to another source the name comes from “dagwood,” from the use of the slender stems of its very hard wood for making “dags” (i.e., daggers and skewers).

The Indians called it “arrow wood” — a clear indication of how they used the branches. The pioneers made horse collars, cogs for gristmills, and shuttles for weaving looms from dogwood.

Our mountain landscape would be severely reduced by an absence of flowering dogwood. The anthracnose fungus that has devastated Pacific dogwood (C. nuttallii) in the northeastern United States and flowering dogwood in parts of the eastern United States has also been a problem in portions of the Smokies region. An informative USDA Forest Service site titled “How to Identify and Control Dogwood Anthracnose” can be accessed at: http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/howtos/ht_dogwd/ht_dog.htm.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(Author’s Note: While running random Internet searches, I occasionally am confronted from out of the blue, as it were, with something I wrote years ago that I’d absolutely forgotten I’d written and failed to store in my computer files. Most of the time I’m not particularly pleased with former musings that pop up in this manner, almost always seeing in them much that I wished I hadn’t written or, at the very least, done a little better job with at the time. Sometimes, however, an epistle from the past looks OK. I think to myself: “Well, that’s that ... not sure I could have done that one much better ... someone else doubtless could and will ... but that’s my best shot.” Here’s one of those few Back Then columns — originally published in Smoky Mountain News on May 16, 2001 — that falls into that category. I couldn’t, of course, resist making a few revisions here and there.)

We are attracted to those places where the forces of the natural and human worlds have come to terms with one another and live in harmony: dilapidated barns chocked full of hay; long-established but abandoned garden spots that produce showy perennials year to year on their own; and homesteads by a creek with lamplight gleaming in the window, smoke curling upward into the starry night.

Old stone walls are the epitome of this sort of balanced existence. Built with hard labor and real care by human hands using the most basic of materials, the stone walls that trace the woodlands and fields here in the mountains often assume a life of their own, existing somewhere between man’s obvious utilitarian desires and nature’s sly chaos. A stone wall that once stood up the creek from our place here on the southern slope of the Smokies near the national park boundary line was typical of most such structures.

It was surely nothing special to look at. About 50 feet in length and several feet high and wide, it wasn’t a pretentious structure by any means. Even as walls go, it was a pretty quiet wall. But it was also a clear sign of some previous family’s attempt to make a permanent statement about their residence in and care for a particular patch of ground. The wall lined a footpath that wound up the creek through a small wooded area to where a footbridge once led out into the “real” world.

These days the “real” world has encompassed that wooded area. Some years ago we spent an afternoon with a chainsaw, hoes, and bare hands reclaiming the wall from honeysuckle and poison ivy vines. Many of the stone walls and piles up on the slopes above the valley were built as a way to stack and remove field stones from areas planted in crops, mostly corn. Beyond serving as refuse areas and ways to prevent soil erosion, they are not especially attractive. But the wall through the woodland beside the creek was built as a way to define a quiet pathway — a link — between the fields and the various homesteads. It was a calculated down-to-earth rural project that was also a spiritual statement of sorts.

John Burroughs, my favorite 19th century naturalist, once observed in an essay titled “Notes By The Way” that he “often thought what a chapter of natural history might be written on ‘Life Under a Stone,’ so many of our smaller creatures take refuge there — ants, crickets, spiders, wasps, bumblebees, the solitary bee, mice, toads, snakes, and newts. What do these things do in a country without stones? A stone makes a good roof, a good shield; it is waterproof and fire-proof, and, until the season becomes too rigorous, frost-proof, too. The field mouse wants no better place to nest than beneath a large, flat stone, and the bumblebee is entirely satisfied if she can get possession of a mouse’s old or abandoned quarters.”

Burroughs was writing about stones in general, of course, but his observations would also apply to stone walls, which are — in my opinion — incomplete without chipmunks. I always hoped a pair would take up residence in this partially tumbled-down stone wall, but they never did. Copperheads lived there. And skinks and mice. Crusted, flat lichens decorated the stones, creating fantastic maps with their doily-like patterns. Some of these slow-growing lichen patches were so large they obviously predated the wall-building itself by centuries. They were perhaps there when the first Indians walked the watershed we now reside in thousands of years ago.

When I paused and studied the wall, it was difficult to discern just where the soil of the pathway ended and the lichen-splotched stone began. These two entities had gradually assimilated, blended, and become one. This path and wall become a part of our family’s everyday existence — a designated wayfare for coming and going by daylight or starlight or moonlight. Even when we didn’t notice the wall, it ordered an important portion of our lives by its very presence. It was a soothing, undemanding, stable presence that was always there and would always be there, I supposed. After all, what can happen to a stone wall? In a single day — less than eight hours — the wall was obliterated by a bulldozer. The new owner of the land above ours on the creek cleared the area for rental cabins. It wasn’t our land or our wall. I don’t regret that I didn’t take a photograph. The sun-dappled pathway and its quiet border of hand-laid stones live on in our memories and those of our children. That’s a species of immortality, I suppose.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My oh my what a wonderful day

Plenty of sunshine in my way

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

Zip-a-dee-eh

Mr Bluebird’s on my shoulder

It’s the truth, it’s actual

Everything is satisfactual

Through the years, I’ve written more than a few columns about eastern bluebirds. Mostly I’ve focused on when or where to put out bluebird houses. The best time to set them out is very early spring or even late winter — but you can do so right now with some chance of success. Keep trying different spots in open areas near perches until you find a location they like. Don’t place them very close to one another.

But I’ve never written about their songs. The early 20th century ornithologist A.C. Bent was of the opinion that the bluebird is, “No great singer; he cannot begin to compete with the greatest songsters of the thrush family.” Well, in our region, the thrush family includes birds like wood thrushes and veerys, both of which are terrific singers. It’s hard to compete in company like that.

Nevertheless, to my ears, the bluebird’s song has always seemed exceedingly pleasant. And now that I’ve read The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005) by Donald Kroodsma, I’ll be even more attuned to their varied singing strategies.

Kroodsma singles out a particular bird and records it time and again, capturing on tape the myriad vocalizations that that individual utilizes while mating, feeding, defending territory, and raising young. Later he transcribes the individual songs into sonograms (visual renderings of the songs) and utilizes computer technology to enhance and analyze the data.

After awhile, sometimes after many months or even years, Kroodsma begins to “see” what the birds are up to with their vocalizations. In other words, listen carefully and listen often, but don’t expect each song to be a carbon copy. Individual male bluebirds will vary in their vocalizations — and the same bird’s song will differ some from vocalization to vocalization, or from place to place, or during different times of the day, and so on.

Roger Tory Peterson described the bluebird’s song as “a musical ‘chur-wi’ ... 3 or 4 soft gurgling notes.” For David Allen Sibley, the song is a “pleasing soft phrase of mellow ‘chiti WEEW wewidoo’ and variations.”

The Birds of America Online (subscription) Web site provides the following observations in regard to various eastern bluebird vocalizations:

“’Tu-a-wee’ is the most common vocalization ... [It is] loud and low pitched, with an abrupt beginning.

“Their ‘loud song’ is a rich warbling, low in pitch and often rapidly delivered, usually by males ... During singing bouts, the male may pivot his body so that he sings sequentially in opposite directions. Sometimes the male spreads his tail while singing or lifts his tail vertically. Males sing their ‘loud song” from conspicuous high perches, sometimes in flight ... They give the ‘loud song’ as advertisement of territory establishment and to attract breeding females.

“Sometimes called a ‘whisper song,’ their ‘soft song’ [is given] when females are laying eggs [and] may function to assure her of the male’s presence.

“Sometimes preceded by one or more clicks, the ‘predator song’ (also called the ‘anger song’) is given in the presence of nest predators by either males or females from protected perches.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

According to the current Ornithological Union listing, the appropriate non-scientific name for a crow is “common crow.” How apt! Like most commonly observed objects, crows, for the most part, flit across our field of vision unheeded. Cawing, they flap away over the fields and into the woods like pieces of black flannel caught in a breeze. We hear and see them, but we don’t really pay attention. We rarely think about them. We never ask ourselves, “What are these birds up to?”

But that’s not the case with Lake Junaluska resident Sue Ellen Jackson. Lately, she’s been observing crows up close and personal — one crow in particular. His name is Roger. Here’s the story.

Some weeks ago, Jackson sent me the following email: “I often have crows visiting my porch (usually about five of them who all come together) because I put out assorted bird seed and food scraps, including small chunks of meat, fish, poultry, bread and leftover cat food .... the crows like the hearty food and it keeps them from stealing the seeds and nuts from the smaller birds. My other regular visitors include titmice, chickadees, house or purple finches (I can’t tell which), towhees, sparrows, blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, etc. I just scatter the seed and scraps rather than using a feeder, as this allows more birds to feed at one time, and the larger area gives each species plenty of room since they aren’t competing with bigger birds for the same food. Plus, I can watch them up close, which I enjoy.

“A couple days ago, I noticed an injured crow on the porch. One wing appeared to be dragging a bit, and I could see some feathers missing near his ‘shoulder.’ I tried to catch him in a box but he was able to evade me and run away (he couldn’t fly) and I was in my pajamas so I couldn’t chase him very far. He was back again today. He is able to hop up on the porch (the patio ledge is about 2-feet tall) and he seems healthy except for his wing, though I don’t know how long he can survive without being able to fly, especially in winter.

“I put out lots of extra food today and he ate well, then wandered off again, but I’m worried that some neighborhood cat or other predator will get him. Is there any animal-welfare agency that could trap him and fix his wing, or put him in a bird sanctuary if it can’t be repaired? Or, will it heal on its own, if I can provide plenty of food for him until it does?”

I replied: “Hello Sue Ellen . . . call one of your local animal hospitals and see if they know of anyone who does wild animal rescues ... let me know what happens ... good luck, George.”

On March 20, I received another email from Sue Ellen: “I’ve been meaning to get back to you about the injured crow I wrote about before. I was going to make another attempt to trap him so he could go to ‘bird rehab’ but he kept his distance. So I kept putting food out for him (table scraps — lots of protein and fat to help his bones mend) along with the regular birdseed (several kinds). At first he could only hop, but to my amazement his broken wing healed very quickly and soon he was able to fly, though at very low altitude ... barely a foot off the ground. The wing healed at a bit of an angle, and, when he walks, the wing tip touches the ground, but now he is flying just fine with the other members of his flock. He comes to my ‘bird breakfast buffet’ every morning, sometimes alone and sometimes with his pals. A happy ending.”

This past Monday afternoon I called Sue Ellen for an update. She reported that Roger’s doing fine and still comes to her porch a couple of times a day. Sometimes he brings along one or more of his crow pals. But most of the time he comes alone because, “He seems to like getting all the food himself,” noted Jackson. When asked, she added that she named him Roger, “Because he reminds me of a pirate, as in Jolly Roger.” She obviously likes Roger, and the feelings are apparently mutual. For her, Roger’s no longer a “common crow.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about birds. I guess I have them on my mind, in part, because the spring migration season is underway. I heard my first Louisiana waterthrush (a warbler) of the year this past Sunday morning. But then again, birds are always on my mind summer, fall, and winter, too. And I’m not alone. Each week that I write about birds, I receive at least 10 emails from readers who share their bird observations and insights with me. Here we go again.

I’ve always supposed that we’re fascinated by birds because they are attractive, often beautiful. And they can sing and fly. Unlike me, many of you who are reading this can actually sing. So you will not be as awe-struck by that capability as I am. But my guess is that few of you can fly.

Just how bird flight evolved has been hotly debated in academic circles. For what it’s worth, I suspect that those who maintain that bird life evolved from ancient dinosaurs are going to prevail. Their case has been strengthened in recent years by a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. The team unearthed a juvenile dromaeosaur dating back 130 million years, which proved to be the first dinosaur discovered with a body covering apparently consisting of fossilized feathers and down.

Bird flight has no doubt come a ways since those long-ago days when dromaeosaurs were flapping around trying their best to become airborne. As we can readily observe on a daily basis, many modern species have become aerial specialists.

Turkey vultures are generally underrated in this regard. They are experts at reading the thermals created as the earth warms each day. Have you ever spotted a flock of vultures riding upwards in the same thermal in a circular flight pattern? Ornithologists call that “a kettle of vultures.”

Think of the explosive and thereby elusive flight pattern displayed by a turkey, grouse, or bobwhite. Then there is the ungainly, yet somehow graceful, flight of a great blue heron, arising awkwardly with a croak and then leveling out in a long smooth glide.

Among raptors, the peregrine falcon is the speed king. One of the most amazing birds in the world, a peregrine feeds on other birds that it takes in mid-air with a powerful dive that may reach speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds are the showboats of the bird world. Their wing beats, which stroke the air at more than 70 times a second, are often heard before one actually sees the bird. They hover, they fly backwards or vertically, and they zoom around. Then, just for the pure fun of it, they dive bomb one another.

One spring day from a high outcrop I watched a pair of ravens mating over Blue Valley near Highlands. Together, they would go so high up into the air that they looked like dark specks. Then they would plummet in tandem, making tight downward spirals, until it appeared they were going to crash into the valley floor. At the very last microsecond, they’d pull out of their dive and then do it all over again.

Another time, I was at Blue Valley watching ravens from a high overlook when one sailed by and eyed me. The first time he came back he did a full somersault. And then, just for good measure, he came by again and did a full body roll, flying for a beat or so while upside down.

“Now that’s flying,” the raven seemed to be telling me.

Barn swallows are the ballet dancers of the bird world. They bring flying to another level. I never tire of watching the patterns — intricate, endless, ever changing, and yet somehow the same — they etch against the sky.

Little wonder that the ancient Cherokees made the birds the guardians of their Upper World, the realm of peace and light and the hereafter. With their songs and with their flight patterns, the birds continue to lift our spirits every day.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..