Black bear in Catskill blueberry barren
— a bear, blue-mouthed, in late July.
Not only on a wall.
“Late July on the Catskill ridges. The lowbush blueberries ripen by the acre across open balds that fire and ice keep treeless, and the black bears come up to eat. A sow with two cubs can clear a barren in a long afternoon. By August the bears are gone and the rake-pickers move in, the same families some of them since the 1880s.
Black bear in Catskill blueberry barren, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Catskill Park covers about 700,000 acres in southern New York, including roughly 287,000 acres of forest preserve protected as forever wild under Article XIV of the state constitution. The park rises in Ulster, Greene, Delaware, and Sullivan counties to peaks above 4,000 feet, with Slide Mountain the highest at 4,180. The high open balds, called blueberry barrens, sit on ridgelines that have held only stunted spruce, sheep laurel, and lowbush blueberry since the last glaciation.
The lowbush blueberry, Vaccinium angustifolium, ripens in waves across the Catskill barrens from mid-July through mid-August. The fruit follows snowmelt up the mountain by about three weeks per thousand feet of elevation. A mature barren can yield several thousand pounds per acre in a good year. The Lenape and Mohican peoples gathered berries on these ridges for centuries before European settlement; the wooden blueberry rake came in with the Maine pickers in the 1880s and is still the tool of choice.
The American black bear, Ursus americanus, is the largest mammal active in the park, with the New York population estimated near 6,000 by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Bears climb to the barrens in late summer to put on weight for winter, and a single adult can take more than thirty thousand berries in a day. They are almost silent at it. The only sound across the ridge is the small dry click of a paw raking a bush, and the wind moving through the sheep laurel.