Roan Mountain

I had the pleasure of being on an excellent birding excursion to Roan Mountain today.  The Roan Mountain massif straddles North Carolina and Tennessee in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the SE US.  

We saw interesting plants and plant communities (grassy balds and spruce-fir forests) and LOTS of new birds (to me) that hang out there, especially in the high-elevation spruce fir forests.  I should have been writing them all down, but I had a checklist, and was busily trying to repeat their calls in my iPod (via the earbuds).  Challenging.

Gray's lily

Rhododendron catawbiense (Catawba rhododendron)

Grassy bald at Roan Mountain

Rhododendrons and spruce-fir forest

A silhouetted bird (I've forgotten which one it was!)  There were a lot of new ones....