March and April, 2021

Here we are, already on the first day of summer as I write this! Spring is always a busy time, and this year's spring was indeed busy, but it was also wonderful. Unlike last year's chaotic spring (oh, 2020), this year's past few months have been relatively smooth, at least around here. We've had a fairly even transition from snowy frozen winter into warmer weather and rain and sun. And I've been able to wander outside and keep up with a lot of the plants and animals in our yard, meadow, and woods as their populations have grown and shifted. I played a game where I tried to know the name of every plant (native and non-native alike) as it flowered on our property this spring, and I made it all the way to the end of May before I had to admit defeat! (Maybe next year I'll make it even further.)

I have a bunch of sights to share from the past few months. This post will cover only the months of March and April (May and June will come later). It's time to go back to snowy days!

We must have had a big boom in our population of Meadow Voles over the winter, because the melting snow in March revealed lots of these rodents' nests in the meadow (and later, extensive tunnels across the ground, damaged plants, etc.). Here's one of the Meadow Vole nests and its perfect melted circle in the snow on March 11:

Big flocks of migrating Snow Geese and Canada Geese crossed the sky -- heading North -- fairly frequently in March. This flock of Snow Geese passed overhead on March 9:

Also on March 9, I saw this Red-tailed Hawk with what looked like a very full crop (I guess somebody found a big meal):
 

On March 21, I was surprised to see a Pileated Woodpecker clinging to our little suet feeder! I'd never seen one of these big birds at our feeders before, and I guess this setup doesn't look super comfortable:

April 11 was a big amphibian night (it was rainy and warm), and we saw Spotted Salamanders and Red-backed Salamanders galore (but no good pictures of those awesome amphibians), plus a couple of big Pickerel Frogs that I didn't recognize at first because I'd never seen them during breeding season before:

Lots of Spring Peepers were also out and about on the night of April 11, including this little peeper who perched on our doormat:

And this peeper who posed nicely on the blue background of our front door:

This was a great spring for flowers! Here are several pristine Bloodroot flowers in our front yard on April 14:

And female Spicebush flowers on the same day and only a few feet away:

Here's American Golden Saxifrage (Chrysosplenium americanum), also on April 14, and a totally new plant for me. These flowers are no more than tiny rings of orange dots, and I only thought to look closely at these plants in the pond in our woods after I read about these flowers in another blog (thanks, Saratoga Woods and Waterways!):

I found this next flower in the protected public land across the street from our house (which I've learned is especially rich in spring wildflowers!), rather than on our property. But I was so thrilled to see these Sharp-lobed Hepatica flowers, which I haven't seen up close in many years! Here's one of these beautiful purple flowers on April 19:

This patch of the woods had lots of white hepatica flowers, too, and I thought these were just as beautiful as the purple ones:

Back in our woods, I was super excited to find our first Red Trillium blossoms (after noticing what I thought looked like trillium leaves in previous years), right next to the path. This picture is from a rainy April 29:

To round out a few more April sightings, here's a very handsome White-throated Sparrow on April 19:

And here's a quite early Garter Snake (also on April 19) who sat perfectly still on the forest floor while I pulled up an invasive honeysuckle bush nearby (notice the large red Velvet Mite on the right as well):

A Common Raven stopped by several times to pull chunks off of a road-killed Raccoon across the street from our house, so we had front row seats for its shopping trips (perhaps it was feeding a family nearby?). Here's the raven visiting on April 22 (yes, that's snow):

Throughout March and April, our trail camera let us see some goings-on in the woods. Here's a compilation of a few video highlights from those months:

1. A Raccoon feeling for critters in the small pond in our woods.
2. Two Virginia Opossums walking together.... I've never seen two opossums at the same time before, so I wonder whether there might have been some thoughts of mating.
3. For a few days in April, I happened to set up the trail camera in what turned out to be a White-tailed Deer's bedroom, and I ended up with many, many videos of deer sitting around and chewing. Here's one of those videos.
4. Also from the deer-bedroom set, there's this video of the sleepy deer standing up, walking next to the camera, and audibly yawning. I think it's really cool to get to hear a deer's yawn.
5. At the fallen-log spot that was so productive last summer, a Long-tailed Weasel.
6. A beautiful Gray Fox.
   

 

And that's March and April! May and June are up next!

A Change-filled Week

Wow. I think I would describe this past week as... "turbulent." With the quickly escalating world health concerns, several aspects of my work were abruptly turned on their head this week, and many people in my part of the world are facing sudden changes in their personal and professional lives. Amid all the uncertainty, I've made sure to take the time this week to go outside and marvel at the changes happening there. These changes in nature can be sudden and surprising, too, but they're also thrilling, joyous, and wholly positive. Spring is coming! So let's focus on those happier changes for a bit, shall we?

The first flowers of the year appeared in our yard this week. :) On March 10, with temperatures in the upper 60s (F), a patch of newly opened Snowdrops played host to a European Honey Bee, who must have been happy to find the only flowers around:

This is not a native plant, and not a native insect, but it's so wonderful to see flowers and pollinators again after months of winter. And Snowdrops are so whimsical, and honey bees so fuzzy, and the sunlight was so warm and sweet on this perfect spring day:

Yesterday, March 12, a patch of reliably early crocuses added their colorful blossoms to our yard:

And today, I spotted tiny blossoms appearing on our American Hazelnut bushes, the first native plants to bloom in our yard this year. American Hazelnuts have these long, hanging structures that produce pollen, and also tiny frilly female structures, all on the same plant:

I planted these hazelnut bushes in 2017, and this is the first year they've bloomed. I'm so happy to see the brilliant pink color of these female flowers, just now emerging from their protective buds:

Most other plants around here are still a ways away from flowering, but hints of life are starting to appear.... Tiny nubs have popped up above the ground where I planted Bloodroot rhizomes near the house last year, which gives me hope that I'll see these wonderful white flowers -- or at least their lovely lobed leaves -- sometime in April:
 

The bird activity is ramping up around here. Red-winged Blackbirds and Common Grackles have returned to the area, and many of our year-round species have increased their singing efforts. A pair of local Common Ravens has become especially vocal, and I have frequently seen the two of them together and heard them calling as they fly over our yard. Yesterday, they got into a dispute with another pair of ravens who must have encroached on their territory, and the four big black birds chased and dove and yelled at each other several times during the day:
 

Common Ravens are not actually common around here, so seeing four birds in the midst of a territorial conflict was pretty amazing. Here's an image of two of those four birds, flying close together either in support or in opposition, but I'm not sure which:
 

Today, I saw a pair of ravens gathering sticks from White Pine trees in the woods around our property. It seems like a nest is in the works somewhere out there, and hopefully this means there will be baby ravens later in the year.

I have a couple of other sights to share from this past week that aren't really related to spring-time changes. Here's a sleek Hairy Woodpecker (a bird which has somehow never appeared on this blog before now) enjoying the suet feeder, the newest addition to our bird-feeding setup:

And the night of March 10 was warm enough that I stepped outside to take pictures of the full supermoon, first with clouds:

And then alone:

And here's one more spring-time report: Today brought my first Wood Frogs of the year. I heard them calling as I walked down the slope toward the small pool in our woods on this sunny 50-degree afternoon -- what a joyous surprise indeed! More change will be on the way now. I'll do my best to focus on the happy changes in our yard, meadow, and woods, and try not to be overwhelmed by the other less happy changes that may come our way.

Winter Solstice

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. I made sure to spend some time outside yesterday to mark this event, but the weather was bitterly cold and overcast, perhaps suitably bleak given the day. Much better was today, the day after the solstice, when temperatures got into the 40s (F) and the sky was sunny and clear. From here on out, the light will be slowly returning, and being outside on this sun-filled day felt like a great way to celebrate that fact!

This is the first place I've lived where I've noticed such a vast difference in the sun's height between summer and winter. (And now that I think about it, I suppose this is the farthest north I've lived.) On summer days, the sun reaches almost directly overhead. Now, the sun barely gets above the trees. I took this picture in our meadow at around 12:30 today, and that's maximum sun for this time of year:

The sun lit up these fuzzy Virgin's Bower seedheads at the edge of the meadow:
 

A Common Raven called for several minutes from the ridge above our house and made a pass over the meadow. Common Ravens aren't actually all that common around here, and I feel very lucky that a pair of these birds seems to be year-round residents at this nearby ridge:
 

I watched some Black-capped Chickadees foraging among old seedheads on our Tulip Tree:

While a couple of noisy White-breasted Nuthatches worked over one of our old apple trees. Those rusty feathers under this bird's tail are one of my favorite things about White-breasted Nuthatches:

What a handsome bird you are, little nuthatch:

I'm hoping for more of these wonderfully sunny days in the wintry months to come, with the sun a bit higher in the sky each day!

The Big Move

From June 26 until July 2, we drove across the country, reversing last year's move from Ohio to California and tacking on a bit more distance for good measure. Two cars, four people (my parents flew out to California and very generously made the drive with us), two pet rabbits and a turtle, and way too many house plants... and all this for ~3,000 miles, over a planned six days that turned into seven when one of our cars required mechanical attention in Wyoming. My goodness. I still can't quite believe we pulled it off.

Having done an almost-as-lengthy move last year, I had at least some idea of what I was getting myself into, and this time I decided to take greater advantage of the sights along the way. After all, when will I be driving across the country again? (If I have my way: never, ever, ever.) We were on a pretty tight schedule, so there wasn't really any time for serious sightseeing, but we planned our brief rest stops at as many scenic places as we could (mostly along I-80), and we ended up seeing lots of cool things. Here's a map of the trip -- red dots are overnight stops, black lines are places where the pictures in this post come from... and for a spoiler of what's coming next, look at where we ended up!

About halfway through our first day of driving, we stopped off at Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, in the Sacramento Valley of California. It was blazingly hot in the refuge (goodbye temperate coastal climate), and a family of very noisy Western Kingbirds was panting in the heat:

This stop also featured the briefest glimpse of a Black-tailed Jackrabbit as it loped across the path:

By late afternoon that same day, we were up in the mountains at Donner Pass, near California's border with Nevada. This was the first of several rest stops where we found abundant and active rodent populations -- I'm sure the presence of people and their food was a big factor in this! Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels were particularly plentiful here:

Large rocks in the glacial meadow at this rest stop were popular lookout spots for these little creatures:

Several chipmunks (I'm unsure of the species) were running around in this meadow as well:

Halfway through the second day -- again, in blistering heat -- we stopped at Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah. I don't know that I've ever seen such an alien landscape:

While this place looked entirely barren at first glance, there was actually quite a bit going on. A Common Raven flew overhead, panting:

A female dragonfly -- with the male dragonfly attached -- was depositing eggs on the surface of what I assume was a very salty pool:

From some angles, the two dragonflies looked more like one super-bug:
 

And I was absolutely delighted by a little Wilson's Phalarope who was foraging in this same pool; this was a totally new bird for me, and its (her?) costume and manner made her very endearing:

She kept swimming in tight circles and snatching up bit of food. I learned later that phalaropes spin to create whirlpools that bring small invertibrates up to the water's surface. What an awesome bird:
 

Here's a brief video of this phalarope hunting like phalaropes do:
 

 
Later that afternoon, we stopped at Echo Canyon in northeastern Utah, where the landscape was about as different from the salt flats as possible:

This place was such an interesting combination of inviting green brush and dramatic cliff faces:
 

Continuing the theme of rodent abundance, the Echo Canyon rest stop was home to a thriving colony of Uinta Ground Squirrels, which are also apparently called Potguts. :)

These little creatures were very bold and VERY loud, emitting ear-piercing tones right at us from a few feet away. Ah, the life of a potgut looks pretty good from here:

Our planned overnight stay in Rock Springs, Wyoming became a day-long visit while we waited for my car to be fixed. Well, that just gave us the chance to explore another totally bizarre landscape. These rock formations were across the street from our hotel:

I'm certainly not used to seeing cactus flowers in the wild, and this cactus's serious spines were a cool bonus:
 

We also met a lovely cottontail rabbit (species unknown) during our further adventures in Rock Springs:

On Day 6, we made it to the Mississippi river:

And this was where I really started to feel like we were returning to the east, with Blue Jays calling and other familiar sights all around. A male Indigo Bunting sang from his mostly-concealed perch:

A damselfly snacked on a smaller (newly molted?) bug:
 

But of course we weren't entirely back in the east yet. An American White Pelican glided in a perfectly smooth and straight line overhead, and it took us all a moment to realize we weren't looking at a plane or kite or something mechanical:

And there's my snapshot of our cross-country trip! A more leisurely pace -- with more time for side adventures, especially out west -- might have been nice, but we were eager to make it to our destination. I'm so very grateful that the trip went as smoothly as it did. And now it's over. And now we're here. And there is so much to explore! More soon!