Thinking Spring

Last Monday I felt that burst of love for the out of doors that I always feel at this time of year, coming in the form of what is known here as spring fever. It’s love, happiness, and a bit of madness all rolled into one, and it makes me ache to be outside. It was a beautiful day; partly sunny and warm at 46°, so I went to the skunk cabbage swamp to see if there was any sign of them yet.

All swamps come with challenges and walking into one is where the madness comes into play. In this swamp there are a lot of hummocks to negotiate and you can either jump from hummock to hummock or walk between them and hope you don’t get your feet wet. I got one foot wet even with waterproof hiking boots on when I sank into the mud over my boot top. But that didn’t matter; my hummock jumping days are over so I expected to come away with wet feet.

One of the hummocks had this curious bright green plant growing on it. I don’t recognize it but it must be tough. The leaves resemble basil but obvously it can’t be that.

And there were the skunk cabbages, coming up through the snow. Through a process called thermogenesis a skunk cabbage plant can raise its temperature to melt through ice and snow. They’re very determined once they feel the pull of spring and will even melt their way through frozen soil.

Here was one I could get a little closer to. It displayed something I’ve wanted to show here for a few years now and that is how, when it first comes up, the skunk cabbage spathe is enclosed in a gray green, pointed sheath.

If you look closely where the sheath has opened you can get a glimpse of the splotched maroon and yellow spathe inside. This is the first time I’ve been able to get a shot of this. There are those who think that the gray green sheaths enclose leaf buds and I thought so too years ago, but this shows otherwise.

The thin sheath quickly rots away, almost liquifying, leaving the spathe to slowly expand and open. Inside the spathe is the spadix, which holds many tiny, greenish flowers. There are few insects around at this time of year but some do eventually enter through the split in the spathe; whether to pollinate the flowers or to just warm up isn’t known. The flowers, much like those of wild ginger, which is another very early bloomer, could be self-pollinating. The pea green leaf buds will show themselves before too long.

A little further in there was the open water of a stream, and two unseen ducks startled me when they exploded from the swamp, quacking loudly and flying as fast as their wings would take them. You can find many different creatures around open water in February because in a normal winter open water is scarce.

Skunk cabbages can grow in standing water as these show, but the one on the left came up too early and was blackened by the below zero cold we had. These plants are tough but there aren’t many spring plants that can stand that kind of cold for long.

One of the animals enjoying the open water of the swamp is the resident beaver, who has been busy cutting trees and dragging them off. This one was a red maple and there wasn’t a sign of it left; no log or branches.

Here was the log from another tree a beaver cut, red maple again with a lot of the outer and inner bark chewed off. How they can drag away logs this big is beyond me. I know they cut them into pieces but stll, a log of this diameter even just two feet long is heavy. Maybe they just roll them into the water and float them off like the lumberjacks used to do.

We pass right by beech buds, never giving them a second look, but as soon as it is warm enough the stronger sunlight will stimulate their growth and they will open and become one of the most beautiful things in the forest. For a time, it looks like silvery-green butterflies have landed on every twig. It’s hard to believe that all the current year’s growth for this particular branch is inside that little bud, but it is.

I was surprised to find maleberry growing here. I think this was the first time I’ve found it not growing on a river or pond bank. The seedpods shown here formed last July or August and will release their seeds by the end of April.

I’ve always liked finding a pile of last year’s leaflets from a cinnamon fern but I’ve never really known why. They just please me somehow, and it’s easier to just leave it at that than it is to wonder why. They dry on the stem in the fall and then slowly fall into a pile at its base, with the one at the very tip the last to fall.

Bracken ferns weaken at the base of the main stem and the whole plant just keels over. The fallen leaves have at times reminded me of miniature dinosaur skeletons, but I suppose it must depend on mood. On this day they just looked like bracken fern leaves.

I found a few goldthread plants here and there, still with last year’s shiny green, three lobed leaves showing. These little plants are evergreen and must get a jump start on photosynthesizing. Their pretty little flowers, which have golden petals that look like like tiny spoons full of nectar for insects to drink, will appear in late April or early May. Getting a good photo of the flowers is always a challenge, which means it’s a flower you can lose yourself in. I recommend doing so as often as possible; there is great peace to be found there.

A colony of American wintergreen grew beside a tree. Though the plant is an evergreen it doesn’t photosynthesize in winter so it doesn’t need green leaves. In fact, many evergreen plants have purple leaves in winter but they’ll be greening up before too long. This plant is also called teaberry and checkerberry because of its minty, bright red berries. I saw where these plants had once had berries but it looked like the turkeys had gotten them all.

Every year in early spring I come across what I see as orange delicate fern moss. I’ve always brushed it off as colorblindness, thinking “That moss is green but I see it as bright orange. Strange.” But the thing is, according to my color finding software, it really is orange. That’s what colorblindness can do; it can make you unsure of almost any color you see. But there is good news for the colorblind. Color correcting glasses are down to $119.00 per pair on one website and after taking a simple online colorblindness test, you can get yourself a pair. You can choose from several styles and if they don’t work for you, you get your money back. Also, there is an app called “Colorblind Pal” for Android users and the color finding computer software I use is called What Color? I know there are a lot of us out there so I like to keep the information I’ve found up to date. I hope it helps. Those are deer droppings on the moss. I saw a lot of them here. I’d guess that the deer are coming to drink from the open water.

According to the calendar spring is more than a month away but I’ve never paid much attention to calendars when it comes to seasons. I’ve always let the land and the plants and animals on it tell me when spring is here, and there are already a lot of signs pointing to it. We could still see some cold and snow but each day that passes makes that less likely. Once we get through mid-March winter’s back is broken, but I think it might happen earlier this year.

Spurred on by the skunk cabbage sightings, I went to see how the hazelnuts were doing. They too had heard the whisper of spring, and the catkins had elongated and become flexible. In winter they’re short and stiff but a good sign that they’re preparing for spring is when they loosen and flex, and start to dangle and blow in the wind. I didn’t see any of the tiny female flowers and that was good, because we could still get some below freezing nights and that might finish them off. It’s too early for the more tender spring flowers to appear so as much as I’d love to see them I hope they aren’t tricked into blooming by this February thaw. Something I noticed while taking this photo was spring birdsong, including that of red winged blackbirds. They’ve come back about a month early but I’ve read that we could see more cold a week from today, so I hope they’ll be able to stand it.

Go to the winter woods: listen there; look, watch, and ‘the dead months’ will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. ~ Fiona Macleod

Thanks for stopping in.