Marauding raccoons have disrupted the peregrine falcon reintroduction program in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park by destroying falcon eggs on the cliffs of Stony Man Mountain, causing the adult birds to abandon the area.

The iconic Stony Man, with a bold profile resembling a human face, stands at around 4,000 feet above sea level, roughly the maximum elevation in Shenandoah National Park.  Steep cliffs form its features.

The National Park restricts human access to the cliff nesting site, but raccoons, which frequent the nearby Skyland Resort, recognize no such limitations. 

As a result of the incident, personnel suspended the remote camera feed that entertained visitors to the resort with its live images of the nest.  Along with the peregrine eggs vanished the opportunity for hikers climbing the popular Stony Man Trail to view the summit-dwelling falcons. 

The yellow lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, a species rarely encountered even by veteran hikers, appears in unusual abundance and unusual proximity to visitors beside a pulloff only a few miles from the northern end of Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park.  The orchids flower in May around 100 feet east of the park’s main road, Skyline Drive, along a footpath paralleling the road where it widens into the first linear parking lot south of Dickey Ridge Visitors Center.

The blossoms, which occur on this flat section of the Blue Ridge crest in association with maidenhair fern, black cohosh and ginseng, thrive on the increased light admitted by the road corridor and the cleared line of hiking trail.  These circumstances permitted them to establish a healthy colony that may date back as far as the 1960s and that flourishes under National Park protection.

Unseasonable heat along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway has drastically advanced the 2010 bloom time for Catawba Rhododendron ( Rhododendron catawbiense ).  The blossoms, the most spectacular wildflowers in America, normally accompany Memorial Day weekend travelers on the 469-mile road, but U.S. Forest Service personnel at Natural Bridge Station in southern Virginia reported the purple blossoms on May 3rd.

Catawba Rhododendron has a linear range that roughly coincides with the length of the Parkway, and a vertical range of several thousand feet.  The north-south line carries a 1-month bloom time variation, while the vertical line also alters bloom time by 1 month.  Since the mountain elevation increases from north to south, nature holds the rhododendron flowering time in rough balance.

The California Condor ( Gymnogyps californianus ) reclaimed its original range within Pinnacles National Monument near Hollister, California with the birth of a chick in early spring of 2010.  The chick first saw light from a nest on Resurrection Wall, a mountain climbing landmark for nearly a century situated within the extreme elevations of the park at around 3,000 feet in elevation.

The high ground designated as The Pinnacles descended from the ragged remnants of an erupted volcano, subsequently moved northward by earthquake activity along a fault line, then eroded to picturesque pinnacles in its present location.

Visitors view Resurrection Wall from a wooden bench perched at 1200 feet above the valley atop Scout Peak, where they train binoculars upward to the nesting site.  The High Peaks Trail, directly opposite the Visitors Center, leads hikers on the strenuous route to the viewing area.

Western Pennsylvania’s Laurel Summit, high elevation site of the 9/11 Flight 93 aerial terrorist attack and, in places, a disorganized heap of bituminous coal as a result of coal miners stripping off its 2,900+-foot summit contour, has been defined anew by altitude.

In a model of social progression, this summit environment that warmed and brightened homes with its coal deposits has rejoined with Pennsylvanians in offering a second element: wind.  In autumn of 2009, the winds will turn 35 turbines anchored in the coal refuse by German-based E.O.N. Climate and Renewables.  The Stoneycreek Wind Farm will brighten up to 16,000 homes.

A lush debris field remains from a tornado that ravaged the high mountaintop that surrounds the Camp David presidential compound in Maryland’s Catoctin National Park.

The passage of several years has converted what initially resembled a linear bulldozer path of wind damage into a dense thicket of berries and hardwood saplings — food for the park’s whitetailed deer herd, as well as nesting habitat for songbirds.

The tornado scar intersects Maryland Route 77 at the National Park entrance sign and continues through a high ground forest of sugar maple, oak and beech.

The Lighthouse Trail, an 0.25-mile path through the pinewoods of the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, recently received new signage explaining its natural features.  A complementary forest cutting has opened up a clearer view of the Chincoteague Lighthouse itself.

The Lighthouse Trail leads to an oak-and-sassafras-crowned sand ridge constituting an extinct dune that, in the early days of the lighthouse, overlooked breaking surf.  Movement of ocean sand subsequently sealed off the ancient dune from the surf, stranding the lighthouse in its present forest location.

A very public stand of the reclusive pink ladyslipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule) began blooming in early May along a fire lane only feet away from the main road running through West Virginia’s Coopers Rock State Park.

The pink ladyslipper, with the historic nickname moccasin flower given for its resemblance to an indian moccasin, colonizes Coopers Rock because of the plant’s preference for high altitude.  The orchid’s habitat there exceeds 2,000 feet in elevation.

Officials at California’s Mendocino Headlands State Park have given top priority to an historic reclamation project atop high tableland overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  According to Jenny Hecheroth, manager of Mendocino’s Ford House Interpretive Center, the focus is a 19th century apron chute employed by redwood loggers and now reduced to iron remnants.  At an elevation of over 50 feet above the surf, where a “blowhole” blasted out by wave action pierces the grassland above Mendocino’s Portuguese Beach, immigrant loggers slid redwood logs through the opening to ships waiting below.

The 19th century immigrant population of Mendocino was so dominant that Mediterranean and Asian plants comprise a large proportion of the grassland flora overlooking Portuguese Beach, according to Teresa Sholars, biologist with nearby College of the Redwoods.  A favorite photographic perspective of the Mendocino townsite still features in the foreground yellow-flowering kale introduced by early Chinese laborers. 

Recent development plans imperil the Mt. Mitchill viewshed, highest elevation ocean view on the mid-Atlantic seaboard.  Noted today for a 9/11 memorial in its foreground, which faces the visible Manhattan skyline; and centuries ago as high ground over which the welcoming Lenape tribe hunted hilltop sweet fern, the viewshed’s aesthetics are altered by periodic slump blocking, during which fragile soils fall away, carrying away forests and the tree branches framing the famous view.

According to Paul Boyd, chair of the Environmental Commission of Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, developers propose three 20-story apartment towers between the central Mt. Mitchill viewpoint and the Atlantic.  The resulting environmental disturbance makes the viewshed susceptible to further slump blocking, which would effectively substitute newly built balconies and rails for the tree branches through which the Lenape viewed the sea.