I'll get to the fox in the title by the end of this post, but first I'll share some sights from what has felt like an especially long first part of spring. I'm sure some of the reason why early spring has felt so long is the fact that I'm now home all the time, and every day seems like an extension of the last. But spring also started pretty early this year, and it sure is taking its time to progress. On the night of March 19, a Spring Peeper showed up on our doorstep as if to say "Hello, it's spring now!" and we heard choruses of these little frogs starting up the next night. This was way earlier than last year, when I didn't hear or see any Spring Peepers until April 5. Here's a picture of this year's early spring herald:
Also on March 19, I was surprised to see Ramps pushing up through the leaf litter in our woods, again a good two and a half weeks earlier than last year:
Wood frogs also got an early start this year, gathering in the pool in our woods and making their quacking sounds way back on March 13 (compared to April 6 last year). Here's one of these frogs floating in the pool on March 26, and staying silent as long as I was there:
While some of our plants and amphibians got an early start, the birds arrived back in our yard this year pretty much right on schedule. It's so wonderful to see so many birds again after they've been absent all winter. I was happy to admire this handsome Song Sparrow up close on March 27 as it and a few of its fellows sang from various corners of our property:
On the morning of March 30, I woke up to the wonderful discovery that our pair of Eastern Phoebes had returned -- they seemed confident and comfortable hunting insects from our back deck, so I am assuming that they're the same pair who has nested at our house for years. Welcome back, phoebes! The male spent some time sitting right outside our bedroom window and loudly announcing his presence:
On April 13 -- amid soaking rain and soggy ground -- I watched the female phoebe gather mud and moss from our yard and fly it up to her usual nesting spot above our front door. The weather hasn't been great for nest building since then, and she hasn't made much progress yet, but it's a start:
On March 27, the Silver Maple tree next to our house looked beautiful in full bloom and backlit by the afternoon sun:
And on the same day, I came across a White-tailed Deer who wasn't expecting to see me emerge from the woods:
The deer got some impressive height as it bounded away:
On March 30, a male Wild Turkey displayed for a few foraging females in our meadow:
White-throated Sparrows have been stopping by our yard in recent weeks, and this brightly-costumed individual looked just too perfect in the midst of a forsythia bush with its emerging yellow flowers:
A couple of Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers have been hanging around the yard as well. Here's the male on a pine tree that bears the marks of many past sapsucker visits:
These birds have made such interesting patterns on this bark, and the resulting textures provide such a wonderful backdrop for the bird himself:
A storm last night brought a few inches of heavy, wet snow. When I woke up this morning, I was surprised, first, by the white stuff covering every surface (this isn't very spring-like!), and then surprised again by the rusty red animal moving through the white meadow. A Red Fox!
We see foxes only rarely during the day (much more frequently at night on the trail camera), and this fox was quite close to the house, so this was an exciting event indeed! What a treat to see this animal so close and just doing its thing. (Please pardon the blurriness of many of these pictures, which I took through windows.)
The fox criss-crossed the meadow and yard, clearly on the hunt:
About half an hour after I first saw the fox, I spotted it again in the meadow, and I witnessed a successful hunt: A precision pounce into a clump of snow-covered grass, and the extraction of a plump vole. Hooray, good job, fox! We have a robust vole population in our yard, if the extensive tunnels throughout the grass (which were exposed when the winter snow melted) is any indication. The fox then moved back through the meadow and yard, stopping at a couple of spots on the way to gather something... which turned out to be more voles that it had caught and cached while I wasn't watching! That's quite a haul!
A quick stop for one more vole buried in the snow:
Got it:
Groceries obtained, the fox headed off our property, presumably to a den of hungry kits somewhere nearby:
Best of luck with your family, fox. Maybe we'll see you around again sometime!
And here we are, still in the early stages of spring. This morning's snow is now entirely melted again. The Bloodroot flowers in our yard are so close to opening, and they've been stalled at the closed-bud stage for days now. We saw a few Spring Peepers and an American Toad out and about on a rainy upper-40s (F) night back on April 7, but we still haven't had the first big amphibian night yet (last year we saw salamanders and more on the night of April 12). It looks like we'll have a stretch of warmer weather coming soon, though, and spring will certainly continue. I'm dreaming of new-green leaves on trees, flowers everywhere, and May birds.... All of that will be here soon enough. :)
Since I last posted (in mid-March), I've been thoroughly enjoying spring in all its various stages. I love early spring, with its barest hints of growth; this picture of our house on a misty mid-April afternoon might seem bleak, but there's the faint green of new grass in the meadow, and the faint red of flowers on the maple trees:
And I love later spring, when everything's bright and new and so colorful; here's a view from our meadow just a month after the previous picture, on May 16:
The time frame for this current post almost exactly matches my two-part spring summary post from 2018 (which, while not planned, is convenient for me, because in the future I'll be able to look back and directly compare these two years). We actually got to spend more time at our house this year compared to last year (no lengthy traveling, and no house damage forcing us to stay in a hotel), so we were around to see more things. Even
so, spring has felt like a whirlwind, with so much change and growth
and motion, and not nearly enough time to take it all in. But I do what I
can! And I've seen some really wonderful things this spring. (With so many sightings, this will need to be two posts. Here's part 1!)
Mammals
All the usual mammals have been around this spring: White-tailed Deer (including a fawn as of yesterday, June 3), Eastern Cottontail Rabbits, Red and Gray Squirrels, and Eastern Chipmunks. A Groundhog has shown up to forage in our yard several times, and while we're fairly certain she's a mother, we haven't seen any babies yet. Here's a chipmunk posing near the edge of our woods on May 1:
This spring has also brought a couple of amazing mammal sightings. For a few chilly days (and nights) at the end of April, a tiny Tricolored Bat (which used to be called an Eastern Pipistrelle) roosted near the ceiling of our front porch. This bat was only a couple of inches long, and we worried about it a bit as it stayed huddled in the same rather open spot for so long; but as soon as the weather warmed up again, it headed off. I feel very lucky to have gotten to see this little creature, and we were happy to share our porch with it:
Also incredibly lucky: On the evening of May 25, I saw a Gray Fox in our meadow. We were both out walking through the meadow, we spotted each other, stared at each other for several seconds (I had binoculars but hadn't brought my camera, sigh), and then the fox turned and bounded off. I knew Gray Foxes were around because they showed up on our trail camera a couple of times last year, but I'd never seen a Gray Fox in person before. It was beautiful, and somehow sleek and bushy at the same time. What an amazing creature! Birds
Spring is a great time for birds, of course, with so many species leaving, arriving, passing through, and getting started with breeding. On March 23, I watched a flock of Snow Geese fly over the house, headed north:
A handsome male Yellow-bellied Sapsucker spent several days in April drilling and tending wells in our Shagbark Hickory tree:
A male Wild Turkey displayed in our meadow a few times, mostly for females who seemed uninterested (this picture is from April 11):
Turkeys are such strange-looking birds. Here's a flamboyant male who passed through the meadow on May 1:
Song Sparrows are among the cast of regulars in our yard during the spring -- I can almost always hear and/or see a Song Sparrow somewhere around the house or meadow if I try. But that doesn't mean I won't take the opportunity to make a picture of one of these handsome birds if they let me; I love Song Sparrows, and I'm very happy to have them around:
The male Chipping Sparrow with the white forehead arrived back in our yard this spring; this was the third year in a row we've seen him here, and it's nice to be able to greet a familiar individual bird:
Sadly, this is the last year we'll get to see this fancy fellow. At some point in May, he stopped showing up in the yard, and a few days later I found his body by the side of the road. I'm guessing he was hit by a car. Finding a dead animal is always sad, but this feels especially so because I could recognize the individual. I suppose these things happen, and I don't like it.
May brought all sorts of exciting avian arrivals. I watched this male Hooded Warbler singing from exposed perches in our woods on May 16:
The apple tree next to our house had lots of blossoms this year, and it drew in quite a few birds (who looked especially pretty surrounded by all those pink flowers). Here's a Blue-winged Warbler on May 17:
And a Tennessee Warbler on the same day:
I saw Tennessee Warblers in this tree several times this May, apparently because of some nice buggy meals hiding inside the blossoms. Here are some more pictures of the same individual from the previous picture, showing off some impressive foraging skills -- watch out, bugs:
Baltimore Orioles were also frequent visitors to this tree, although I kept missing them with my camera. Even at one of the more distant trees, though, a male Baltimore Oriole surrounded by apple blossoms made quite a sight:
See the next post (part 2) for the rest of this spring's sightings!
Two weekends ago, on September 24, Paul and I went for a morning walk in Cornell's Sapsucker Woods. I'm starting to really love this place, and this visit held some particularly special moments. First, we finally found the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture that's eluded us on previous visits; this stonework cairn is tucked into the forest alongside a path, and it's lovely and subtle and such a fitting feature in these quiet woods:
A juvenile Yellow-bellied Sapsucker blended into the shaded trunk where it was foraging; a sapsucker in Sapsucker Woods, how appropriate!
Green Frogs peered up at us from a small green-covered pond:
And one frog posed nicely on a dark log:
At one point, we rounded a bend in the path to see big dark shapes up ahead:
We'd wandered into a Wild Turkey parlor, and these birds were understandably wary about our appearance:
But we stayed where we were -- some distance from the birds, although not really very far away -- and after a minute or so, the turkeys started preening. One turkey even laid down right in the middle of the path to preen, settling into a sunbeam:
These turkeys certainly knew we were there -- the front turkey kept an especially close watch on us -- but they seemed willing to share their space with us. Here's a video of these turkeys preening (pardon the noise of an airplane flying overhead):
Eventually, we decided to continue on our way; and as we came closer to them, the turkeys just calmly stood up and ambled off into the woods. Through the whole encounter, I kept thinking how extraordinarily polite these birds were. Thank you, wonderful big creatures, for letting us be with you in your woods for a little while:
So that was awesome. A little further down the path, a flock of hundreds of Common Grackles worked through the forest around us. And past the grackles, I found Beechdrops (Epifagus virginiana) emerging from the forest floor:
I didn't even know that this plant existed before I saw it. Beechdrops, it turns out, is one of those weird types of leafless plants that gets its nutrients by parasitizing another plant (in this case, American Beech trees). These small flowers on plain branching stems are actually quite lovely up close:
At the end of our walk, a Painted Turtle basked in a sunny pond:
And colorful sprays of goldenrod and aster -- so many colors! -- decorated the path back to the parking lot:
And speaking of colors, in the two weeks since I took these pictures, the landscape here has almost entirely changed. Fall has arrived, and it's wonderful. Hooray for seasons, and woods, and big polite birds.
I was happy to discover yesterday that the banks along the creek behind our house gather some interesting signs of animal traffic. There were deer prints, of course, sometimes quite deep in the mud (I think there's something of a deer highway through these woods):
And little hand-prints, which (I'm pretty sure) were left by a passing raccoon:
The bank with these tracks was also dug up in several spots. What tasty treats might a raccoon find buried in the mud and rocks?
The creek's banks held another type of animal artifact, again (I think) from a raccoon, but this one long dead:
Skulls are definitely interesting -- look how bright and sharp those teeth are -- but I didn't feel the need to explore this object more closely. It'll stay on the bank until the water rises again and carries it off somewhere else.
Speaking of long-gone creatures, I've been keeping an eye out for Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, because the signs of these birds are all over our yard. This tree in front of our house features several conspicuous lines of sapsucker holes:
And I've come across a few trees in the woods that are about as covered with sapsucker work as it's possible for a tree to be:
It must have taken years for the sapsuckers to so thoroughly work over this tree:
But all the holes I've seen are pretty old by now, and I haven't come across any more recent signs of these birds. I wonder why this former sapsucker territory is apparently abandoned now.
It's always interesting to see signs that creatures have left, although I still prefer to see the creatures themselves!
