Best gift of time to draw: eight months in the New England Woods.

1) Best Rediscovered Antique Food: Apples and Cider. If there’s a characteristic product of New England, it’s not maple syrup, it’s apples and cider. In drawing the ruins of cider mills, I obsess over apples,  modes of milling them for drink, (water-powered and  horse or oxen-powered), what varieties of apples were used for cider (ungrafted, hard and bitter), why hard cider was the drink of choice for man, woman and child (safer to drink than well water in a time of bad sanitation).

What's left of a hillside cider mill, probably ox-powered, in Petersham. The trees are still there, still making apples.

In autumn there is superb apple-picking at the local orchards. Great heirlooms: Roxbury Russet, Arkansas Black, Winter Banana and Macoun (introduced in 1923, not technically an heirloom, but a fine crunchy sweet apple anyway. Try to find one).

The esteemed Macoun apple.

2) Best Unexpected Modern-day Tie-In to an Archaeological Site: You’d be amazed at what’s out there on Google. Especially when you’re hunting down information on abandoned cellar holes in the New England forest. On Google, I find one story with a very sweet ending:

Where Charles Rogers was born. Where Thomas and Martha started their family and kept it going through generations.

Thomas and Martha Rogers begin farming in Petersham, Mass, circa 1740. They have cattle, sheep, oxen, pigs and pastures, grain, fine hay meadows and a two-story Colonial house with good cellar and ell at the rear. Their barn has a manure basement and stone ramp for herding in cattle and backing up a hay wagon, stone-walled enclosures and cattle lanes, two wells, outbuildings, and sugar maples to mark out the fence lines and tap for syrup.  The Rogers are substantial, upright citizens. Their 15 children, those who outlive them, will carry on the family farm, and so will their children and their children’s children, and so on.

Rogers Barn foundation. The barn sill would have sat up on top; the manure dropped down below to be scooped and spread on the fields.

Here’s what I find on Google: Thomas and Martha’s  great-great grandson Charles Rogers, born in 1855 in the very house that stood above these cellar stones among which I’m now standing knee-deep in ferns and dewberry rendering in pencil, grows up to be somebody. As a teenager he leaves the farm and works his way West, settling in Victoria, BC, where he learns to make candy. His new company, Rogers Chocolates, succeeds, grows and prospers.

Naturally, Rogers Chocolates has a website. An order of their chocolate-covered candied orange peels and Ice Wine Truffle Bars arrives by Fedex in August and keeps me going at the place of his birth. Under a sweet spell, I draw the fallen-in foundation, buried in biomass, stones pushed apart by tree roots and shaded by hemlocks and hardwoods. The chocolate is very, very, very good.

Rogers Chocolates, come home to Petersham.

3) Best Popular Culture Investigation of 18th and 19th century New England: Who isn’t interested in what the founding fathers drank? While drawing the overgrown ruins of an old inn and onetime tavern, I got inordinately  curious about menus, tavern signage, drinks, and customs. Drawing the mossy cellar stones I listened closely, and heard the faraway clink of glasses, hoof beats of arriving travelers and the calls of a drunken cattle drover ordering another mug of tod and a syllabub for his friend (see recipe) with a hunk of (passenger) pigeon pie on the side. In 1818, ten cents will get you a mug of tod at Fields Tavern in Athol, Massachusetts. For four cents more, they’ll take care of your horse while you drink it.

This should be good- it's so darn quaint

Drawing the French Road Inn, Petersham, one of the earliest taverns in town.

4) Best Heirloom Animal: Oxen. Slow, ponderous, powerful, beautiful. The sustainable tractor of the colonial era. They did everything from hauling stone to plowing fields to pulling stumps to turning wooden gears on cider mills. Oxen were preferable for plowing small, stone-walled fields- the family-farm field that became impractical for machinery like harrows and harvesters, pulled by the horse power of a new market economy. Think about it: you are a proud New England farmer. You have spent years building your stone walls well, so they will last for centuries (and they do). Would you take them down again to make space for the latest in farming technology? Why not just start over in Omaha?

Craig the Chianina Ox, resting up for the Oxen Pull at the Belchertown Fair

Back to oxen: I was smitten with their dewy-eyed patience and sturdy handsomeness. One stormy day in October I watched a Red Devon named Henry turn the sweep of a wooden cider mill. I sat in the bleachers at the Belchertown fair and cheered on the great white Chianinas in the oxen pull. I drew them as they rested in the shade of their ox trailers, as their owners spoke long and enthusiastically of their oxen; they loved them too.

Handsome Henry the Red Devon Ox, Old Sturbridge Village

5) Best Island Getaway: Ireland. On holiday this July, I sketched fiddlers and box players tearing it up in Galway pubs every night, then cleared my head with sea air in the morning on the River Corrib.  The Ant Man and I hiked the windy moors of Connemara and wobbled around the Aran Islands on rented bicycles.

From the seawall on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway.

Threading our way through packed crowds of all-night revelers in the streets of Galway (it was Horse Race Week) we had hilarious and slightly dangerous fun. Not as dangerous for us as it must have been for the young lasses in ten-inch platform shoes. Lovely Ireland. They build their walls from stone, too.

Box, aka accordion, player, in Crane Pub in Galway, Ireland. Sketched over a creamy Guinness to the tune of a hornpipe.

Black-headed gulls on the mudflats of the River Corrib, Galway.

6) Best Literal Overview of Historical Ecology: Thoreau’s 19th Century landscape was tame, bucolic, a patchwork of cultivated fields, open meadows and small woodlots. He mourned the chopping down of the forests and eradication of wildlife (nothing larger than a muskrat around Walden Pond). “But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.” Sorry he couldn’t have stayed around for the rebound effect.

Graphic demonstration of the relentless march of nature: same spot, 121 years apart- from farm to forest.

7) Best Birding at the End of a Pencil: Bobolinks at Petersham Commons. There’s a large open meadow off Main Street in Petersham. The town keeps a mowed footpath leading from the street  to a small pond at the bottom of the hill; it’s a lovely place for a stroll, full of tall green waving grass and wildflowers, and by May, bobolinks. They are here because of the meadow, they are declining, ironically, because of the forest.

Bobolinks bubbling over in the meadow.

8) Best New Mammal Unfazed by Human Presence Since it Can’t See it. An indication of how well the New England forest has recovered is its wildlife. Moose, bear, fisher and my new favorite critter, porcupine. This one was grazing on a friend’s front lawn. Luckily for me, porcupines don’t see too well.

9) Best Audiobook to Draw By in the Ruins of a 19th Century Farm: When I tired of red-eyed vireos and hermit thrushes, I listened to podcasts and audio books. Wendell Berry’s That Distant Land, a collection of chronological and character-driven stories of farm life in the 19th century was perfect. It’s what was playing while I drew this:

Ruined foundation of a farm outbuilding, possibly an ice-house.

10) Best Historical Costume in a Dream: There’s a commotion outside my window. I look out through a veil of mist to see people stroll by dressed in 18th and 19th century finery. Revolutionary War officers in high black boots and white breeches ride glossy, prancing horses. Others are in street clothes: long dresses, long black coats, hats. A woman in a tall powdered wig stands out; she’s dressed for the grand ball in a gown of gray and silver silk. As she turns and looks at me, she dissolves into the mist, leaving me with the sense I’d just been visited by the people whose histories I’d spent the past few months rudely rummaging around in.

Your carriage is waiting, Ma'am.

When I woke up, I swore off pizza and syllabub at bedtime, a good New Year’s resolution, by the way.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” –Henry David Thoreau

Wishing you all a joyful, peaceful and prosperous New Year; may it be fascinating and timeless for you, too.

At the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival in Harlingen last week, super-quick field sketches caught these birds on the move- except for the egret, I drew them through the window of a bus rolling through Texas scrubland; color splashes from a mint-tin watercolor kit and written notes serve to fill in the details.

If you want to make a birder laugh, pull out your Altoids tin, and instead of offering a mint, use it to paint a bird. That’s how I spent five days at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival in Harlingen, Texas last week: cracking up other birders and sketching birds.

Mint?

Yes, please- I'll have the burnt sienna. My kit: an Altoids Smalls tin, tube watercolors squeezed into and dried in empty plastic half-pans (available from Daniel Smith Art Materials), a Niji waterbrush and a Canson Field Drawing Book.

Altoids in action at Santa Ana NWR, Rio Grande Valley, TX. Trying to nail down a green jay at the visitor center's busy feeders. Photo by Amy K. Hooper/WildBirdmagazine.com

Side-by-side comparison of two similar species- Red-crowned and Red-lored parrots, Harlingen, TX. Fabulous flocks , flying through the neighborhoods at dusk and raising a lovely ruckus. A happy bunch of birds and jubilant birders dancing in the street below, myself included.

For the dedicated birder, a field sketch doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it can serve at least one useful purpose: bird identification.

Scenario 1: you’re walking alone in the fall woods and a migrating songbird wave breaks around you, with dozens of warblers, vireos and tanagers snapping up the last bugs like  shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving.  No time to leaf through the field guide, but you don’t need it; just watch and draw. You can identify those confusing warblers later.

The facial pattern on the green jay is amazingly weird to figure out in the field. It's likely meant to break up the outline of the head- and it's pretty, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in terms of feather tracts or anatomy.

Scenario 2: you’re in the Peruvian rainforest and encounter an irritatingly diverse mixed flock of unknown birds. Now it’s dinner time and you sit down to a simple (but satisfying) meal of platanos and beans while thumbing through the tattered pages of your (huge, heavy and left behind in your room) field guide. Sketchbook open, you shovel food in your mouth, compare your drawings with the illustrations in the book, and start to figure out what the heck flew by today.

A fast-moving mixed flock in northern Peru nearly gave me a stroke trying to draw them all, but at least I could sort them out later at leisure. Pretty field sketches are not essential- swift notations and a few coherent lines get the job done. Even unpretty sketches have their own pleasing aesthetic. That evening, a more experienced birder verified the uncommon Lafresnaye's piculet from this drawing. He even told me how to pronounce it (hint: the first 's' is silent). Thank you, More Experienced Birder!

Here’s another motive for field sketching: cheap travel souvenirs

Scenario 3: You are at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, in the company of a sharp-eyed group of festival participants, under the wing of superb, expert tour guides who know every flash, chip-note and understory scuttle; I.D. is no problem here, but you pull out your pencil and catch a great kiskadee in the top of a Spanish-moss-draped oak. Okay, so you missed the buff-bellied hummingbird, but you got a cool sketch of a big, really jazzy flycatcher.

Who doesn't love a kiskadee? The one at the bottom was heading into the wind, lengthwise on an oak limb. It appeared to be branch-surfing.

I suppose that’s the one downside of sketch-birding: you won’t see as many birds as the rest of the group, but the birds you see, you’ll see really well. You’ll retain a memory of its shape and field marks a little better, and might even have a treasured keepsake of your tour. (But try to be aware of time and space; keep out of other birder’s lines of sight and, above all, keep up with the tour group. Have fun and expect to hear cackles of amusement when you pull out the Altoids)

In five days at the festival I saw 125 species- not bad for a sketch-birder- and 21 were lifers, including a dozen or so least grebes pumping out the cuteness vibe on an oxbow pond at Sabal Palm Reserve near Brownsville, TX. We sat in a blind on the water and there was no problem getting long looks- and drawings. Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival.

The wolf pine now howls at the fall foliage. White pine, Petersham

After many months, I just looked up and realized just how late it’s gotten- while I was busy, the forest changed from a symphony of green to an arboreal fiesta of reds and yellows. People are stuffed into coats and scarves with raw chilled hands plunged in pockets for warmth. The harvest is in, my project is done. It’s a wrap. It’s time to go home.

Lovellville Mill in Holden, Mass. A 19th Century textile mill that was built on the edge of a double waterfall.

I’ve learned various things from my odyssey in the woods- all about heirloom apples and ox-milled apple cider, how an ice-house works, early American taverns and roadhouses, and how to use Google for finding 18th century farm journals, among other things…but what it comes down to is this:

The forest is the story.

19th century water-powered cider mill dam, Nelson's Brook, Petersham.

People are tied to the land, and this land was, and still is, shaped by people. The New England forest is filled with artifacts and relics, skeletons and ghosts, and is in itself an artifact of human history.

Wing Spooner 's malt mill, built sometime in the late 1700s, worked through the early 1800s. Ale, anyone?

There are a couple of new pages with lots more artwork, and there’s lots more to come as soon as I get to finish scanning it all in. I’ve been a poor correspondent, I know. It was necessary to keep low to the ground, to go to a quiet place. The woods were perfect.  Thoreau said, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”

Excuse me while I brush away the leaves and mould, and return myself to the world.

The Negus house was built around 1737, abandoned by 1815, taken over by the forest shortly after that. Four generations lived, farmed, and died here. The lilacs still grow around the doorway, what's left of it.

Oh the chimney’s fallen down and the roof’s all caved in
Lettin’ in the sunshine and the rain
And the only friend I’ve got now is that good old dog of mine
And the little old log cabin in the lane

____”Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, Will S. Hays, 1871

Along a forest path a few miles from here is the long-abandoned cellar hole of the Negus family home. It’s a little hard to find: the little country lane meanders through deep woods, unconnected to anything, and the house foundation is just barely visible through the rampant vegetation. If you follow the stone walls they’ll lead you on a pine-sprouted roadbed; if you look alongside the walls you’ll see ancient sugar maples planted by an 18th century farmer’s hand. As you pick your way through the brush, search for a giant multi-branched pine revealing the location of what once was a field. It’s now surrounded by tall straight hardwoods and younger pines, but it got into that fabulous shape by first growing out in the open where it had plenty of room to spread.

Pasture Pine, aka "Wolf Pine", a dead giveaway that this piece of forest was once a pasture.

Today I’m pushing my way through thickets of mountain laurel and waist-high ferns; under the shady canopy of tall oak, ash, and maple I gingerly ford a swampy creek on cushions of damp moss, finally reaching the spot where, early in the 18th century, William Negus and his wife Persis cleared the stony land and built a house. Here they farmed, raised 10 children, and found time to plant lilacs by the door.

The Negus lilacs, right beside what would have been the front door.

A corner of the Negus cellar hole; I'm drawing while perched on the crumbling mound of the old chimney-stack.

A lot happened here over four generations. Great-grandchildren Nathan and Caroline Negus would grow up to be wonderful, notable artists (Caroline painted portraits, including those of Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson). And one terrible day in 1797, William’s grandson Joseph, age 14, was dealt a mortal blow by his sister Mary, age 15, in a freak accident – an accident involving horseplay and a sharp scythe.

I’ve been here drawing to the tune of a hermit thrush. What lovely, haunting music to sketch by.

A big thank-you to the Petersham Historical Society, which has been sharing the Negus family historical material with me- and a special thanks to Bob Clark of the PHS, who somehow remembered how to find this place, and led me to it.

Department of Corrections: Caroline Negus didn’t live at this site; the family had moved to another house in Petersham by the time she was born. Nathan lived here until he was around seven years old. Mary Negus was 12, not 15, when she dealt her brother Joseph Jr. the mortal blow with the scythe. He was either 14 or 15 years old- the record is a bit hazy. The Motmot regrets the errors.

Chestnut-sided warblers, a feast for the eyes. These two males were dueling over a prime patch of scrub and mud at the edge of a field. Warbler duels involve singing, plumage flaunting and chasing with occasional ugly physical scuffles.

I’ve been hearing complaints that this hasn’t been a great migrant year (unless you happened to be in Central Park this spring- they had a splendid run) but to my  eyes, it’s been glorious. An hour each morning with binoculars and sketchbooks, drawing little jewels with feathers as they zip through tree tops and shrubbery? A piquant mix of frustration and delight. A blackburnian warbler’s torchy orangeness gets the blood pumping and the mind clear faster than a double espresso with an extra shot. Many new sketches are now uploaded to this page, and there’s even a side-page just for warblers, which have been awesome around here, in my warbler-impoverished westerner’s opinion.

Single-boulder quarry, circa 19th century sometime early, I'd guess. Harvard Forest.

This week we’ve had a string of fine days. Even the mosquitoes are tapering off  (the deer flies and ticks have surged in to fill the gap). Lots of new sites to draw, but the other day I revisited a hand-quarried boulder I had drawn many times on my last visit to Harvard Forest in 2008. The huge slabs still lay akimbo, unchanged but for three year’s growth of overhanging hemlock. It was very much like meeting with a dear old friend, one who has spent the intervening years not doing much except growing out her hair.

The drawing, graphite and pastel on Rives BFK.

Same place, three years ago and a little earlier in the spring.