It’s been almost two years since we followed this trail in late December 2023. Tripp Farm Trail is part of the maze of trails weaving through the 750 woodland acres of Carolina North Forest. We finally got ourselves a detailed map of all the trails from the University of North Carolina.
As you can see, the woods are still decidedly green. Fall colors don’t peak around here until the second week of November. Which makes November less bleak than we were used to in New England, but makes October here feel more like a September up north.
(this one made Tim think of the sword of Damocles)
We don’t see birds often in this forest, but the last time we did this trail I found a bluebird. This time Tim spotted a woodpecker, way high up on a tall snag. There’s a reason we never see birders here — or even people with cameras — but I’ll accept this small gift with gratitude. We’re there mainly to forest bathe in the phytoncides the trees give off!
The world of machines is running
Beyond the world of trees
Where only a leaf is turning
In a small high breeze.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)
Nothing like a good walk in the woods! 🍂
A walk in the woods puts everything in perspective! 🍂
I like the fourth photo best because of the cooler contrast and composition. I’m not in agreement with Tim that is a woodpecker but I am agreeable that it is a bird. I hope Tim sprayed you up good for this walk. So happy to hear that you are both out enjoying the trails.
The machines are running our world. I wonder if Wendell Berry would be pleased?
It was being very industrious hammering it’s head into the wood looking for insects. Based on that I called it a woodpecker.
💙
The color contrast in the fourth photo is very striking, thanks to the lovely sunlight coming through the greenery to highlight the rusty browns. I actually forgot to get sprayed and even wound up wearing the wrong shoes on this walk – I can’t believe how absent-minded I’m getting sometimes. I’m sure, though, that the bird is a downy woodpecker, probably a female. 🍂
I’m not feeling absent minded, yet. But I have lost a lot of my memory. It seems to be on the decline. There are holes in my personal life time line. I do feel like an old brown leaf hanging on… suspended in time.
I happened to snatch a memory to save your photo in my iPhone 14 which now has AI that will automatically identify whatever is in the photo and then place it into my photo calendar on the actual day the photo was taken. I don’t know who AI reports this to or why it just recently started happening last month. But it was this AI in my phone that identified the bird. I don’t like that it steals all my privacy!
I have never liked the idea of Alexa in some one’s house, either.
I’m ok with using AI but not with AI spying on me. I will never get use to that. 🍂
I suspect there are a lot of us old brown leaves hanging onto our memories as best we can, even though our perceptions of time are playing tricks on us.
Interesting feature your iPhone has. My Android does something similar by identifying the people in my photographs and creating photo montages with different themes that pop up on the screen at random times. I don’t know what it’s doing! It’s pretty amazing that it will pick one of my grandchildren and show me a slide show of pictures of them from birth to last week – how does it know it is the same kid?
Oh my gosh! That’s creepy!!
I agree! Very creepy!!
It’s a Downy Woodpecker, Barbara! Its pecker sure is tiny!! 🍂
So happy you changed your mind, Teri! It wasn’t the greatest camera angle to see the size of her beak! 🍂
I suppose that’s one more challenge of relocating, huh, Barbara? The notion that certain things are supposed to happen at certain times of the year (like leaves turning). I think that’s part of the challenge of air travel across time zones, too. One can’t help but feel a bit discombobulated by it all!
I like your forest adventure and can practically feel the coolness and calm through your photos. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but you’re right: not everything makes it to the ground! Maybe the hangers-on are happy in their state of suspension??
Perhaps that’s been the greatest challenge from moving down here for me. After 66 years of living in the land of spectacular Octobers, I’m still finding it difficult waiting until November for colors for this, my third autumn here now. I’m adjusting to other changes quite well, though, like the early arrival of spring. I’m reading a book about flukes, chance occurrences and how they have affected all of us since the dawn of time, and the suspended leaves getting stuck by chance seem to illustrate some of the thoughts that were on my mind. 🍂
Three autumns already?? Golly, it seems like just yesterday that you were telling us of your move. How time flies!
I can’t believe how fast the seasons are flying by, Debbie! It feels more and more like home.
Two years ago already and look how much you have discovered since and will discover more now with your trail map. Soon there will be no stopping you and Tim from woodsy adventures! We have a lot of brown leaves, just hanging on, waiting for a wind to let them wiggle free. The peak leaf color, if the leaves get vibrant, is not predicted until November now – I just heard that on the weather report today, all because of our Summer/early Fall drought. I like your little Downy Woodpecker Barbara – it’s very cute. I can’t tell if it is a male as it is a side angle – the males have a little red patch at the back of the head.
I imagine Tim’s lungs will eventually stop us from our walks in the woods, they have slowed us down considerably, but we’re going to keep going as long as we can. With the map we can be more purposeful and focused. Every time he needs to stop and catch his breath I look around for interesting things to photograph. In fact, if he hadn’t been stopped and been looking around himself he would never have noticed the little woodpecker up there! I’m pretty sure she’s a female. That’s interesting that your colors won’t be peaking until November, how disappointing. Is that going to affect your Walktober post? 🍂
I hope for both of you, that Tim’s lungs stay healthy enough for your nature jaunts and a better quality of life all around … fingers crossed. Those Downies are so cute. We had one at Council Point Park which I named “Dempsey” – I’ve not seen him in a few years. I often saw his little red patch before I saw him inching around the tree (the Safe Haven Tree). As to the leaf colors, that’s what the weather folks are saying – the cooler temps which cause the leaves to turn colors didn’t happen early enough, so the leaves continued to produce chlorophyll and stayed green. The moderate drought conditions stressed them out as well. I did my Walktober last weekend but won’t be posting it for a few weeks (26th). I went to two big parks and saw no color, so I went to Heritage Park the day after their annual Harvest/Halloween event and got some shots in their little woods (a combo harvest/spooky stroll).
From what I’ve read the Ofev drug the pulmonologist put Tim on works well at slowing down the progression of ILD, which may give him a few more years of life. I just hope that Medicare will keep paying for it after this administration gets done destroying all the programs that help us. It costs over $13,000 a month, which totally blows my mind.
AI says downy woodpeckers typically live for about 1 to 2 years in the wild which might explain why you haven’t seen Dempsey. I love that phrase you used, inching around, that describes what downy woodpeckers do perfectly. 🙂
I do wonder what out leaf colors will be like this year, haven’t heard any predictions on the news yet. I hope to be doing my Walktober walk tomorrow – I think I found something unique at the park outside the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh – fingers crossed. Looking forward to your combo harvest/spooky stroll!
I’m glad they have a drug to help slow down Tim’s progression of ILD. I hope they continue to pay for that expensive drug – $13,000 a month is just outrageous. Many years ago my mom was on an expensive cream she applied to her legs – it was a very potent antibiotic which had to be applied to thwart the cellulitis. My mom’s skin on her lower legs was very thing from years of surgeries from her car accident at age 11. So even the tiniest scratch could set off a cellulitis flare-up and she’d need an IV infusion of Vancomycin (the strongest antibiotic at that time). So the cream was $130.00 for a small tube which lasted a few weeks – this was about 25-30 years ago. Her infectious disease doctor helped her get fairly large samples from the manufacturer – she was not yet on Medicare, nor did she get Social Security. I helped by paying for it until she got onto this program and that upset her as she liked being independent. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but your pharmacist or doctor hopefully can help put you in touch with the manufacturer – if they have a heart they will help out.
I just saw an extended outlook for Winter re: La Nina and it was for a snowier-than-usual season. I hope they are wrong. Sigh. We have very pleasant weather right now and I’ve been walking a lot and doing some outside painting. It will rain this weekend. I can’t take the car out of the garage as I had some cement patching done on the driveway Saturday, so I walked to the eye doctor this morning, an almost 5-mile round trip … I am happy as the eyes are good, no progression of cataracts – I had to go twice this year for him to monitor and don’t go back now until April. So that was good news … I wasn’t going to have anything done until Spring anyway as I don’t want to be driving around in Winter with appointments, surgeries, follow-up for both eyes – my boss had cataract surgeries, measurements, pre-op (seven or eight appointments) scheduled and ultimately changed his mind and didn’t have it done.
I hope you enjoy your Walktober stroll – an art theme and hopefully some leaf colors too will be fun and I’ll look forward to your stroll as well. They finally put the scarecrows out at the Botanical Gardens per a post on Facebook yesterday – they now have them in the woods lined up on either side of the path instead of around the grounds. I liked the old way better … I’m not going back as I’ve already finished the post and I think I had 36 pictures – way over my limit, but I had a “pre-walk” of fun harvest shots too. I’m trying to stay ahead with my posts as I need to start my Winter grocery shopping sooner rather than later, hopefully next Monday.
Your poor mother, what she had to endure in her life is so sad to think about. It must make your memories of your days with her so bittersweet. My son had cellulitis once, on his face. He was in severe pain for hours in the ER before they admitted him. He had to have an antibiotic infusion and in the course of treating him they discovered he had type 2 diabetes. I’m sure one way or another Tim will keep getting the drug – the cost of it just blows my mind. $130 was a fortune back then. When our cat Butterscotch got hit by a car and needed surgery it cost my father $64. After that he kept calling him the $64 cat. Tim thinks today it would probably cost upwards of $600 for the same surgery.
It would be nice for us if it would snow here just once this winter, but we don’t have to go anywhere and can just enjoy seeing it outside the window. ❄️ That was good cataract news! That’s one of the great things about retirement – it doesn’t matter if you have a rainy weekend because you can take advantage of sunny days during the week. ☀️
I don’t think there will be any leaf colors for my autumn walk, we are still in the “patchy” stage on the foliage map and won’t peak until the second week in November, too late for Walktober. I’m learning to adjust my expectations. An old neighbor of mine posted pictures of scarecrows displayed in Olde Mistick Village on Facebook yesterday. They never had that before when I was living there. I’m looking forward to seeing your scarecrow pictures post! 👨🏻🌾
Many people have never heard of cellulitis, confusing it with cellulite dimples on one’s thighs or bum. That sounds very serious for your son, but, at least the discovery of having type 2 diabetes was a silver lining in the dark cloud. I hope the medication is still readily available for Tim, no matter what happens administration-wise. There should be a fund set up by the shipyard to pay for treatment of work-related injuries, even years later, like often happens for asbestosis-related issues.
When my mom was hospitalized for four years at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, she said her parents paid $15.00 a week for her entire admission. That time frame was from 1937 to 1941. Medical care is outrageously expensive now.
Yes, that is true about retirement. I had to hope that the weather was good to get out and take long walks and get photos for my blog so the well didn’t run dry by mid-Winter. Sometimes I only made it to the Park on weekends at mid-day when the ice/snow would be partially melted. (This past Winter I still didn’t make it there for three weeks on any day.)
I like scarecrows and I’ve thought about going to this event, but always change my mind due to crowd size and the fact that I can go up the following day and still get a flavor for the event and pictures. They have some music, vendors, food trucks and dancing witches, but that’s at dusk and I would be gone by then. They used to have a headless horseman riding on the grounds. Too bad they didn’t do the scarecrow event while you still lived there. Adjusting our expectations seems to happen more and more these days – sigh.
I love a nice walk in the woods. I always enjoy the details that you and Tim notice as you stroll. The little woodpecker was indeed a gift. I was walking a bit on Saturday at a little pond and noticed a small bird flitting around in the very tops of the trees. My Merlin Bird ID said it was a yellow bellied sapsucker, which appeared to be similar in size to the downy woodpecker.
Wow! A yellow bellied sapsucker! I’d love to see one of those some day, and get a photo of one, too. I remember my father getting all excited about seeing one at his birdfeeder back in the 1990s in Connecticut. Lucky you! 🍂