The Longest Bird Strip Census—
The Northville-Placid Trail, Adirondack
Park, NY
1-22 July 2026
In July 2026 I walked the length of the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT), which transects the Adirondack Park from south to north, starting in Northville, and ending on the Averyville Road, just south of Lake Placid village. The trail is 138 miles long, and spends most of its distance rambling through forests, passing lakes and streams, and avoiding mountaintops. This makes for great walking and great forest-watching. In addition, it provided an opportunity to carry out a “mega-transect” of birdsong in the woods. I counted all singing birds heard along my 14-day walk. I did this section-by-section.
When I informed my immediate family of my plan to carry out this solo walk, they were quite concerned about my safety in the woods. So I agreed to do a sample walk of four days in the southernmost section of the NPT, then, after I proved I could do the walk with minimal risk, I re-provisioned and returned to the trail a week later. This was a useful process, and in doing so I had a better sense of my equipment and food needs. In particular, I purchased a fabulous new backpack (An Osprey Aether Plus 85) that made the trip much less onerous.
I am 74. I had not carried a backpack in the Adirondacks since 1974—fifty-two years ago. Back then, I hated carrying a backpack. Now, I wondered whether I could adjust to having this burden back on my shoulders. By having a nicely-crafted pack and by keeping the weight to a mininum (around 28 pounds) I was able to manage the pack with minimal suffering. I am thinking that in my teens I was much less adapted to pain than I am now, after decades of adult life. That was an interesting discovery about my adaptability.
The NPT is entirely unlike the better-known Appalachian Trail. The latter follows the height of land for 2,000 miles—that means the hiker is continually ascending or descending on a rocky and difficult trail. By contrast, the NPT sticks to the valleys—visiting lakes, streams, rivers, and beaver swamps, and viewing the summits from a distance. The walker can enjoy traveling at pace through the forest and on a trail that is broad, soft and duff-laden, and easy to track. This is a plain pleasure to engage. Because most Adirondack hikers want to climb “peaks,” the NPT is little walked, and as a result the trail is not butchered by an excess of pounding Vibram soles. Some of the NPT trail is overgrown, but that just means the walker needs to push his way through light thickets of Balsam Fir, Hobblebush, and American Beech saplings. Many of the NPT’s current trail sectors were once logging roads or fire roads, meaning ease of walking. For this 74-year-old, a day’s walk on the NPT was pure pleasure.
My focus was on birdsong and old growth forest. Because of the dates of my walk, I experienced gradual decline of birdsong as July trended toward August. The old growth forest was surprisigly abundant and on most days I saw big trees—trees that were well over 200 years old, some perhaps 400 years old. The featured species are Yellow Birch, Eastern Hemlock, Eastern White Pine, White Ash, and Red Spruce. I regularly encountered trailside Yellow Birch with a DBH in excess of a meter. Some of the Eastern White Pine were toweringly tall. And the abundance of stands of ancient Eastern Hemlock made for gloriously shady deep forest.
Strangely, in some areas (e.g., the upper Cold River) there was no old forest and there was much planted monoculture of conifers, some nonnative. Apparently these poorly-growing stands were planted in the 1930s. Of course, disturbance is much a part of the Adirondack forests. Logging led to vast forest fires (1903, 1908) and in 1950 a hurricane passed through and produced a great blow-down of trees up north in the Park.
Over the deacde, timber extraction worked its way down the value chain, starting with the best giant Eastern White Pines and ending with smaller growth taken for wood pulp and paper. Even this is now declining and Finch Paper (formerly Finch Pruyn) is now closing its mill in Glen Falls and now halting the taking of pulpwood from the Adirondacks.
So, what is it like walking 8 hours a day for a fortnight? It is remarkably enjoyable, especially when the birdsong survey and big tree encounters are thrown in. The day goes by very quickly, and one is in the sleeping bag before sundown (it is quite dark in the woods at that time). I had a dogeared paperback copy of Moby Dick with me, and I read this at meals and while inside my mosquito net under my tarp. I burned the read pages to start my fires.
Here was my day: rise at 5:30am. Heat water for cocoa and instant oatmeal. Wash up and pack and get on the trail by 7:30am. Stop when a rest or snack is needed and just keep moving. Halt walking by 4pm. Set up camp. Heat water for dinner (a packet of spicey noodles or a Mountain House freeze dried dinner). Read a few pages of Moby Dick. Hit the hay.
My main comfort issue of the trip was the pre-dawn cold. On most nights the air temperature dropped into the 40s. I was unprepared for this and lacked proper clothing and suffered from an inadequate sleeping bag. I was forced to wear wool sox on my feet, cotton sox on my hands, a towel over my head, and two extra layers—a poncho and a ground sheet over the sleeping bag to maintain my body temperature. I purchased extra sleeping clothes in Blue Mountain Lake and Long Lake to contend with this issue (but it was never enough).
Solitude! I was on my own with my own thoughts 98% of my walk. During my two weeks on the trail I encountered 5 other through-walkers and a handful of day-hikers. I never slept in the company of any others. I was on my own. This solitude was splendid. I was able to daydream and think thoughts all day long. No iPhone newsfeed, no telephone calls, no emails, no MS Now, no Washington Post. The glory of no Trump!
Much of my wandering mind trailed back to the times in the
1960s and 1970s when I spent summers in the Adirondacks. Thoughts of my first
encounter with a Black Bear, my first caught Small-mouthed Bass, my first canoe
trip down the Raquette River, my first climbs of Mt Kempshall and Buck Mountain,
digging for ancient Indian pottery in the bluff at the Verner’s Little Camp on
Long Lake with Joan Verner. Lots of memories. It was nice to excavate these
from the back of my brain.
I walked with a walking stick that I had crafted from a lacrosse defenseman’s long pole. This was invaluable. I much prefer the single “stave” to the standard pair of modified ski poles. I think it is much more stable and allows the walker to have a free hand to grasp at grips when losing balance.
I mainly drank from tiny streams that drained uninhabited forest hillsides. On occasions when I needed to take lake water I used Aquatabs to purify the water. I suffered no stomach complaints. I never saw a Deer Tick and never saw a White-tailed Deer on my walk.
Wild quadrupeds were remarkably few on my hike. Here is what I encountered along the trail in order of abundance: American Toad, Red Squirrel, Eastern Chipmunk, Red Eft, Garter Snake. I heard keening Coyote packs on two nights, Common Loons on most nights, and Barred Owls on three nights. I saw bear poop on the trail on three occasions and I noted a Moose track once. The Adirondacks are famous for being impoverished of quadruped wildlife. On the other hand, singing birds were abundant, even as I passed through the second half of July.
Here are the results of my bird surveys: I encountered 56 bird species of 1,221 individuals. Based on total counts, the most abundant species were Red-eyed Vireo (387), Ovenbird (121), Black-throated Blue Warbler (87), Black-throated Green Warbler (65), Blue-headed Vireo (49), Hermit Thrush (44), Winter Wren (38), and Black-capped Chickadee (37).
I made 45 individual strip surveys while walking. Prevalence on these surveys was dominated by the following species: Red-eyed Vireo (in 42 of 45 surveys), Black-throated Blue Warbler (34), Black-throated Green Warbler (28), Ovenbird (26), Black-capped Chickadee (24), Winter Wren (20), Blue-headed Vireo (19), and Blue Jay (19). It turns out the most abundant 4 species were also the most prevalent…
Seasonality undoubtedly impacted these results. Many migrant songbirds I never encountered, probably because they cease singing shortly after their first nesting. No Rose-breasted Grosbeak. No Canada Warbler, etc etc. Also as July progressed, birdsong declined. I recorded songs of 55 Ovenbirds in the first eight sectors (1-3 July), but only 1 Ovenbird in the last eight sectors (20-22 July). Clearly, the Ovenbird was running out of steam as July headed towards August.
For those early and late surveys, Red-eyed Vireo also showed
a decline: 96 individuals in the first 8 sectors, and 18 individuals in the
last 8 sectors.
I hope to re-do the walking survey of singing birds along
the trail in 2027 at the peak of migrant song (late May/early June). I suspect
that will provide a strikingly different result, with more species and more
numbers.
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