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Gene Stratton-Porter, Musician

7/29/2015

By Adrienne Provenzano

When Gene Stratton-Porter is discussed, she is usually mentioned as an
author, a photographer, and a naturalist. The label “musician" is not generally
ascribed to her, but a review of her life and works makes clear the appropriateness
of adding this word to describe her.

We need look no further than at titles of her books such as The Song of the
Cardinal and Music of the Wild to know that Gene perceived the world in musical
terms. Music is featured in other ways in her works as well - for example, many
songs are quoted in Laddie and the main character of Freckles is described as a fine
singer. In The Girl of the Limberlost, the violin music Elnora creates is like the
Limberlost itself . Says Elnora, "I can make it do the wind in the swamp, the birds,
and the animals. I can make any sound I ever heard on it."

Gene herself loved music and played the piano, banjo and violin. According to
biographer Barbara Olenyik Morrow's book Nature's Storyteller: The Life of Gene
Stratton-Porter, as a teenager Gene became interested in music of Schubert,
Wagner, Liszt, and Mozart. She enjoyed concerts at the Chautauquas at Sylvan Lake
in Indiana, and during her visit to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in
Chicago with husband Charles, she may have also attended musical performances.

In her Limberlost Cabin in Geneva, Indiana, there is a room dedicated to
music, with ornate plaster work incorporating musical images decorating the walls.
A photograph in that room shows the banjo that daughter Jeanette played, as well
as the piano now located at Gene's home called Wildflower Woods which is located
on Sylvan Lake in northern Indiana and, like Limberlost Cabin, also an Indiana State
Historic Site.

Being a musician myself, it will be with great pleasure and a sense of privilege
that I return for the third time to perform music at Limberlost Cabin on August 1st
as part of the Geneva's Geneva event. Site Manager Randy Lehman has been
instrumental (pun intended!) in providing me with this opportunity. Curt Burnette,
the site's naturalist, has kindly nicknamed me as Songstress of the Limberlost. I
hope you will come visit me in the cabin to hear music of Gene's time period -
including pieces by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, a composer whose works she enjoyed. I'll
also perform some original compositions I've created over the years inspired by
her life and work and premier new selections setting some of Gene's poems to
music.

Bobolink

7/27/2015

By Terri Gorney

Gene Stratton-Porter commented that she enjoyed hearing a Bobolink every summer.
“This veritable music box pours out his song, the whole of which is an interrupted run,
interspersed with his call note and ravishing variations which run high and drop again in
a sort of fantasy of irrepressible, spontaneous clearness.”

In May 1908, Gene was very pleased to show T. Gilbert Pearson the male Bobolink in his
breeding plumage on the Stanley farm on the east side of Geneva. Gilbert would go on to
lead the National Audubon Society.

The male is distinctive in his breeding plumage and perches on low vegetation while
singing. He frequently sings in flight also. The Bobolink is black underneath and white
on the back making him look like he is wearing a tuxedo backwards. After the breeding
season, he returns to drab coloring, similar to the female, and remains that way until the
following spring.

Bobolinks are a good bird to have around open fields as they eat mostly seeds from what
are considered weeds at this time of year.

The Bobolinks like to nest in open fields of alfalfa, hay or clover. They are a ground
nesting bird and the nests are made of grasses and are hard to locate as they are well
hidden in vegetation cover. The female will leave the nest and run before flying. A
female will typically lay 4-7 eggs. Their populations have been decreasing due to habitat
destruction and a pair will raise only one brood a year. According to Don Gorney, a bird
expert from Indianapolis, Bobolinks are a grassland specialist that are sensitive to habitat
size. He estimates that they need a minimum of 50 acres to nest.

Ken Brunswick has seen as many as four males at one time at Limberlost this year. Ken’s
boyhood recollections of it in the 1950s on his family farm in Ohio is “etched in his
mind.” They nested in the hay fields on the family farm.

Jane Brooks Hine, a female ornithologist from DeKalb County, was given credit by the
Indiana Academy of Sciences for the first sighting of a Bobolink in Noble County in
1883. By 1886 she writes that there was a pair nesting on her farm in northwest DeKalb
County.

It is very gratifying to see these beautiful birds back at Limberlost. Gene Stratton-Porter
would be very pleased to know that her singer has now chosen to nest and spend the
summer season back at her beloved Limberlost. She enjoyed watching them nest in the
summer. She commented that “the Bobolinks danced and chattered on stumps and fences,
in an agony of suspense, when their nests were approached, crying pitifully if they were
destroyed.”

After about a nine week stay in our area, Bobolinks typically congregate in marshes
before the long journey back to their winter home in central South America. They usually
migrate in large flocks which they will be doing shortly. May they have a safe journey
and return to the Limberlost next spring!

If you are interested in researching more on the Bobolink, check out these websites:
www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/bobolink/id, www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov,
www.nationalzoo.si.edu.

Munro Nature Preserve

7/20/2015

By Terri Gorney

Nestled in southern Adams County is a little natural and historic gem called the Munro
Nature Preserve. It is the first and only preserve owned by ACRES in the county. It is
located to the west of the town of Geneva and north of the restored wetlands of the
Limberlost and Loblolly. The preserve is just over twenty-five acres and was generously
donated in 1994 by two sister-in-laws, Esther Munro Cooper and Agnes Biery Fravel
Munro, wife of Esther’s brother Lloyd.

Asa and Edith (Dillon) Munro moved their family of eight from Illinois to southern
Adams County, Indiana in February 1917. The couple’s six children were Esther, Clark,
Ruth, Willard, Lloyd and Warren. They arrived in a 1916 Jeffery seven-passenger touring
car. A railroad box car brought the family’s household goods and livestock, including
two horses, a cat and a dog and a few farm implements. Asa, a farmer by profession,
purchased the land that was known as “the old Porter farm.” This land had at least forty
oil wells on it at one time.

Their daughter, Esther Launa Munro was born in 1900 Piper City, Illinois. She attended
Geneva High School and later taught in Hartford township schools after her graduation
from Indiana University. Esther also attended Ball State University. It was there that she
met and married Dr. Robert Cooper of Muncie. He later was on the faculty at the university
as a biology professor. In 1969, they donated their woods and land to Ball State to be
managed by the Department of Biology. Today it is known as the Esther L. and Robert H.
Cooper Memorial Woodland Area.

The Robert Cooper Audubon Chapter was named in his honor. The society established
the Robert and Esther (Munro) Cooper Conservation Award. Robert and Esther were
honored as the first recipients in 1983.

This preserve was once part of a 239 acres farm owned by Charles Porter and his wife
Gene Stratton-Porter. Even though they lived in a fourteen room cabin in Geneva, the
Porters owned this land from April 1890 to the end of 1906. When Gene wrote about
their farm, she was referring to this land. This farm contained working oil wells when the
Porters owned it.

There is a brick schoolhouse ruins on the property. It is the Hartford Township
Schoolhouse District No. 6 also known as Brushwood. It was built in 1903. The school
was made famous in Gene Stratton-Porter’s book “A Girl of the Limberlost.” It was the
school that the book’s heroine, Elnora Comstock, attended. The youngest of the Munro
children were students at this school.

This area of southern Adams County is rich in the history of the old Limberlost Swamp
and its restored wetlands, the Limberlost State Historic Site, and the Ceylon Bridge
which is the last covered bridge on the Wabash River.

Agnes died in 1996 at the age of 90 and is buried next to Lloyd at the Riverside Cemetery
in Geneva. Esther died in 1997 at the age of 97. We owe them our gratitude for saving
their woods and a piece of Indiana history.

Photo by Becca James

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

7/13/2015

by Alex Forsythe

I have had the pleasure of helping to band a Red-bellied Woodpecker. Their size and the length of their beak may seem fearsome, but they are far less aggressive when being extracted from the net than a Northern Cardinal. Cardinals will grab your skin with their beak and twist it!

I was in for a pleasant surprise with this bird: I got a close-up view of its tongue! It's one thing to see a Red-bellied Woodpecker use that amazing tongue at your feeder, but it's a far different thing when that tongue whips out right in front of you. The length is unbelievable: about three times the length of the bird's beak. It resembles a weapon from a fictional apocalyptic movie: a long spear with multiple barbs facing backward toward the throat (like a harpoon on steroids), ending with a sharp point on the end, and coated with a sticky substance. It is a perfectly designed tool for extracting insects from their burrows, able to reach into a narrow opening, blindly search for and locate insects, and pull the insects out using the barbs and goo. In the case of a grub, the the sharp end of the tongue may be used to skewer its prey. "En garde! Oops. Too late."

The beak itself harbors another weapon, this time used against unsuspecting nuts. The woodpecker cracks open nuts by using its beak as a hammer and a tree as an anvil. Wedging the nut into a crevice in the bark, the woodpecker pounds on the nut with its beak until the nut's shell gives way.

Nuts are one of the bird's favorite foods, but the other is insects. The Red-bellied Woodpecker is a voracious predator of some of our most harmful insects. One tree can contain 1,000 adult Emerald Ash Borer beetles. Woodpeckers have been observed consuming 95% of the larvae before they can emerge as adults, making them a natural and native biological weapon against these invasive and expensive pests ("Emerald Ash Borer in North America: a research and regulatory challenge", Cappaert, et al., 2005). A friend of mine, birder and naturalist extraordinaire Jim McCormac, wrote about the increase in the Red-bellied Woodpecker and its relationship to the Emerald Ash Borer: http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/2013/12/woodpeckers-boom-probably-because-of.html In Ohio where Mr. McCormac resides, the CBC totals in 2012 showed a 55% increase in population of Red-bellied Woodpeckers since 2003. Indiana's 114th CBC had record numbers of Red-bellied Woodpeckers: 1929 statewide.

Red-bellied Woodpeckers are also painfully aware that it is prudent to save for a rainy (or snowy) day. They store food to sustain them during times that meals are hard to find.

Now let's discuss the elephant in the room: the misleading name. People often mistakenly call this a Red-headed Woodpecker. It does have a red head after all, but the true Red-headed Woodpecker has a far more spectacular red head, so it claims that name. But what about the "red belly"? It's not often that you can see the reddish color on the bird's stomach while in the field. If you look very closely, you might see a reddish patch with a yellowish wash on the belly that looks as if someone dropped a dollop of paint on the bird and made a poor effort of trying to wash it off.

The invasive European Starling has been a constant source of irritation for our native Red-bellied Woodpeckers, evicting the woodpeckers from their nest cavities about 50% of the time ("Nesting phenology and competition for nest sites among Red-headed and Red-bellied Woodpeckers and European Starlings", Ingold, 1989). This video of a battle between a Starling and a Red-bellied Woodpecker over a nest cavity will make you cringe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x5W9w-fxik

Dark-eyed Junco

7/6/2015

By Alex Forsythe

"A very quiet and well-conducted little member of our winter choir, with habits similar to those of the nuthatch, is the junco, with dark head and back, white breast, and grey sides. With an ivory-white bill, he feasts daintily at our winter offerings, occasionally remarking: 'tsip, tsip'. This is merely a whisper of sound. Occasionally he pauses and whispers a high, halting strain of a few notes with small variation that I am unable to give any form of syllabication." - Gene Stratton-Porter, "Homing with the Birds".

You have no doubt seen these cute little birds hopping on the ground underneath your bird feeder in the winter, but you aren't the only one watching them! Scientists have studied this species extensively. Over 1,300,000 Juncos have been banded since 1955, and over 15,000 of the banded birds have been recovered.

Researchers at Indiana University have conducted numerous studies on Juncos. They built the Kent Farm Bird Observatory facility including indoor and outdoor free-flight aviaries for housing flocks of juncos. A recent I.U. study monitored the effects of testosterone on Juncos. Increased testosterone allowed males to win mates, but they lost interest in raising their young had a shorter lifespan (Ketterson, et al., Indiana University 2007). In 1994, I.U. scientists studied the ability of Juncos to survive in winter when food is scarce by tracking the variations in their fat reserves. They noted that Juncos choose different wintering latitudes as they age (Rogers, et al., Indiana University 1994).

Scientists in other areas of the country have also be studying Juncos extensively. Their movements over (or more typically around) hills were tracked for three years in New Jersey. Not surprisingly, the birds chose the lower altitudes whenever possible (Schaeffer, "North American Bird Bander" 1979). The Junco's increased oxygen demands in winter are met by the bird's ability to increase its oxygen-carrying capacity (Swanson, Oregon State University 1990). Scientists have even studied the preening oils of Juncos and found that Juncos can distinguish between males and females by the odor of the oils, and they can use the odor to determine whether a bird is larger or smaller. Surprisingly, the females seemed to prefer the smaller males in this study (Whittaker, et al., "Behavioral Ecology" 2011).

Why are Juncos studied so often? They are easy to observe! They are common and sociable so it is not difficult to find a large group. They come easily to feeders so it is a simple task to attract them to net sites.

The interest in this bird and volume of study has even resulted in a popular documentary: "The Ordinary Extraordinary Junco" (http://juncoproject.org/). The film was designed by Indiana University to be a revolutionary type of multimedia textbook, teaching high school and college students in 8 "chapters" about the scientific method, ecology, genetics, physiology and animal behavior. I.U. allows free screenings of the 88-minute film for non-profit organizations and independent theaters upon request, so if you want to learn more about Juncos, you might want to arrange a screening for your local Audubon Society. As Bob Duquesne stated in his review of the film in "BDN Maine Outdoors" , "I will never look at a junco the same way again... [T]his little gray bird has a lot to teach us, about birds and about ourselves."

Gene Stratton-Porter, Musician

Bobolink

Munro Nature Preserve

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

Dark-eyed Junco

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