Pennsylvania Game News - August 2011 - 51

buck, but it was still impressive. After he melted into the woods, a suitable distance behind the super buck, a third buck, with an even smaller rack, ambled across the right-of-way. Such a scene proves to my satisfaction that bucks stay together when they aren’t breeding, and that the one with the largest rack leads. But perhaps I am projecting my own ideas on what may have been coincidence. Still, Leonard Lee Rue III, in his classic the Deer of North america, writes that “In the springtime, whitetail bucks are often solitary, or sometimes a big buck is followed by several younger bucks,” exactly what I witnessed, except that it wasn’t in springtime, so what I saw still leaves me with questions about relationships between bucks. Mammal relationships continue to interest me when I surprised three young raccoons in our stream early one August morning. They ran up the slope and climbed a tree. Five days later, much farther down the stream, I heard what I thought was squabbling raccoons. I sat down on Waterthrush Bench, above the stream, and waited. A few moments later, mamma raccoon paraded down a fallen tree trunk toward the stream, followed by her three youngsters. I remained motionless and heard another squabbling outburst, but tree leaves blocked my view. After waiting awhile and seeing nothing more of the little family, I continued on down the road and looked back up at that tree trunk. Below it is a large tree with a hole at its base, which I assume, but don’t know for sure, is the raccoons’ den tree.
august 2011

I also assumed that those three raccoons are the same ones I saw before and that they were ranging a fair distance in search of food. Even insects sometimes surprise me. One August evening, a New Jersey visitor showed off his powerful flashlight, illuminating a spectacular, lime-green luna moth on a black walnut tree trunk in our yard next to the walnut tree where we saw a luna moth, freshly emerged, 364 days ago. According to David L. Wagner, in his Caterpillars of Eastern North america, the luna moth’s caterpillar feeds on many forest tree leaves but has “decided local preferences,” which include walnuts, as well as birch and black gum leaves in our area, and pecan, persimmon and sweet gum farther South. But while seeing a luna moth is an unexpected treat, walkingsticks always appear on the side of our house or on a screen door in August, and those same New Jersey visitors were impressed when I pointed one out. And any August visitors who spend nights in our guesthouse are invariably kept awake by the thrum of northern true katydids, even as we are lulled to sleep by them. After years of pushing through the many orb webs of spined micrathena spiders and, indeed, expecting them in August, last August I saw only a few. Had their numbers crashed or was it an off-year for them? Sometimes, even the expected can throw me a curve ball. But the wildflowers, in August, are predictable. Along our forest paths, the yellow
51

Pennsylvania Game News - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - August 2011