Spring Fever

I know what you’re probably thinking; since robins stay here all winter now they aren’t really a sign of spring anymore. I’d agree with you up to a point but this photo is here because I saw this bird yanking earthworms out of this lawn and that means the soil has thawed out, and that certainly is a sign of spring. Unfortunately getting a photo of him yanking earthworms out of the ground wasn’t going to happen. He was too quick for me.

The female flowers of American hazelnut (Corylus Americana) have opened even though there is still snow on the ground. It could be because the temperature finally shot up to 70 degrees, but whatever caused it they’ve opened before the male catkins. It might be that the female flower’s opening signals the male flowers that it’s time to open. I’ve never paid close enough attention to know for sure. I looked back at last year’s blog photos and found that I first saw these flowers on exactly the same day in 2014, so apparently the severity of winter doesn’t affect their bloom time.

Female hazelnuts are among the smallest flowers that I know of. I understand that not everyone who reads this blog has seen a female hazel flower though, so this year I clipped a standard 1 inch paperclip to the branch to give you an idea of just how small these tiny beauties really are. You have to look very carefully to find them; I can just barely see them by eye.

I was surprised to find the female hazelnut flowers open when the male flowers, shown here, hadn’t even started shedding pollen yet, but maybe this is the way it happens every year. I’ve got to pay a little closer attention.

Female red maple flowers (Acer rubrum) look a lot like female American hazelnut flowers, but they are much bigger and easier to see, thankfully. The female flowers mostly wait for the wind to blow some pollen their way, but bees occasionally visit them too.  Female flowers usually happen in clusters with each flower having 5 sepals, 5 petals, and 2 styles. Once pollinated they quickly become pairs of bright red, slightly hairy samaras.  I’ve read that you can find yellow or orange samaras, but I’ve only seen red.

Each male flower is about 1/8″ long with 5 sepals, and 5 petals like the female flower, but instead of styles has several stamens. The sepals and petals are usually red and difficult to tell apart. Anyone who understands flower parts should easily recognize the male red maple flower because of its stamens, which resemble the stamens of other flowers like lilies, daylilies, tradescantia and many others.

Each year I try to get a photo of a red maple tree flowering and usually don’t have any luck but this year the sun was in just the right spot to illuminate the flowers. There are many thousands of flowers on a single tree. This means that maple sugaring season has ended. Once the flower buds open the sap becomes bitter.

I’m starting to see more and more crocus blossoms. The daffodils should bloom soon. They are budded now but not showing any color yet.

This blossom had what I think was a honey bee in it. Its pollen sacs were bulging but it was rolling all around inside the flower as if it had reached bee nirvana and was in an ecstatic frenzy.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.  ~Georgia O’Keeffe

The scilla (Scilla siberica) I planted a few years ago are showing some color. They are also starting to multiply a bit, I’m happy to see. As soon as I raked the winter’s fallen oak leaves off them every squirrel in the neighborhood started digging in the newly uncovered soil. At first I thought they were digging up the scilla bulbs, but they were just digging up the acorns they had buried last fall.

In the book Suburban Safari; a Year On The Lawn, author Hannah Holmes tells how scientists have found that squirrels eat white oak acorns immediately and bury red oak acorns to eat the following year. That’s because the squirrels somehow know that white oak acorns germinate in the same autumn that they fall from the tree and red oak acorns don’t germinate until the following year. The red oak acorns are good for storing but the white oak acorns aren’t, so the next time you see a squirrel burying an acorn it’s a safe bet that it’s from a red oak.

 

It’s great to see water instead of ice and snow in the woods.

We had some rain last week and the soil is saturated so the water really can’t seep into the ground. Instead it runs downhill.

The snow was plowed off this pond all winter to make a place to skate and you can see how the darker plowed ice is melting faster than that which wasn’t plowed, over on the right.  It’s a good lesson in how darker things absorb more heat from the sun. I always have to smile when I hear people complain about the dirty snowbanks in spring. They don’t seem to realize that they melt a lot faster than the clean ones.

Over the years many plow trucks have broken through this ice and ended up on the bottom of the pond. Luckily it wasn’t ever deep enough to harm the driver, but the trucks needed an overhaul and the driver a cup of good hot coffee.

The banks of the Ashuelot River in Swanzey are almost snow free, but on this day you could still see some way down at the far end where it makes a turn. There is still plenty in the woods, too.

Canada geese have returned to the river and are still staying just out of comfortable camera range.

 

There is enough melt and rainwater flowing into the Ashuelot River to make some nice big waves again. I like to watch them but I also like trying to get photos of them. When you watch you can tune in to the rhythm of the river but only in a photo can you see all the color, movement and beauty that you missed when everything was happening so quickly.

It’s spring fever, that’s what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! ~Mark Twain

Thanks for coming by.

Read Full Post »

Spring Runoff

We had about two inches of rain last week and almost all the snow has now melted, so I set off to find out how our streams and rivers were handling all of the extra water. Brickyard Brook in Richmond (above) didn’t look any different than it would in high summer. The small gorge this little brook cuts through is a favorite spot of mine. It’s always shaded and cool and is a great place to just sit and enjoy the sounds of falling water.

Bailey Brook in Nelson drops considerably more than Brickyard Brook and has two waterfalls along its length. This photo shows the lower falls, which were roaring. This is not the place to come if you’re looking for a quiet day beside a gentle stream.

I was very surprised to see false hellebore (Veratrum viride) shoots about four inches high. Nelson is supposed to be one of the coldest towns in the county but many plants are further along there than they are in the warmer southern towns.

I was also surprised to see that something had eaten a couple of the false hellebore shoots. This plant is among the most toxic in the forest but I’ve read that deer have a “toxicity threshold” and can eat as many as they like as long as they don’t go above that threshold. This lets them also eat skunk cabbage, another toxic plant. False hellebore can sicken sheep, goats and cattle, and can kill people who sometimes mistake it for wild leeks at this time of year.

The upper falls on Bailey Brook didn’t have anywhere near the amount of water falling over them as I thought they would. Again, not much more than they would in summer.  I wanted to get closer for a better photo without the tree in the way but I took a fall here last year and almost ended up in the brook, so I decided that I could live with the tree in the shot.

Further south in Keene Beaver Brook was different. There was a lot of water there, filling the banks.

Even thought it was high, you could see by how the water stripped the bark from the lower part of this tree that it has been much higher in the past. The exposed part of the log had been bleached silver-gray.

White foam swirled in eddies in the sheltered areas along its banks.

There is still a lot of ice left to melt in shaded areas of the forest.  Maybe this was why Beaver Brook was running faster than the others.

The disappearing waterfall on the far hillside was there, just as I thought it would be. It runs for a day or two after a good rain and then disappears, so it can literally be here one day and gone the next. There was still snow in the shaded areas on that side of the brook.

Beaver brook falls roared over its 30 to 40 foot height. It wasn’t deafening but it was plenty loud. The surface of the brook was made much choppier than it usually is by the force of so much falling water. Since the ice was gone in this spot I was able to climb / slide down the steep embankment to the canyon for an unobstructed view. I’ve wasted many a climb down to the brook only to find the falls in deep shade, but on this day the lighting was perfect.

Regular readers of this blog know that this story will end at the Ashuelot River as it must, since all streams, brooks, and rivers in the region drain into it before it drains into the much larger Connecticut River. Its banks are full at the moment. The clouds above it formed an arrow pointing upriver and as I look at the photo I wonder if I should have followed the sign.

For those new to this blog, the name Ashuelot is pronounced ash-wil-ot or ash-wee-lot. I was raised to say ash-wil-ot. In Native American Penacook or Natick language the word means “the place between.” I assume they must have meant “between hills” because we have plenty of those and the river does run between them.

Downriver in Swanzey the Ashuelot had jumped its banks and turned these hayfields into a temporary marsh. The normal course of the river is off in the distance, just in front of the trees to the left, and it would be hard to see from this spot in summer. This land has probably been flooding since the glaciers that helped form it melted.

The Canada geese seemed very happy with the flooding.

Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth.  ~Anonymous

Thanks for stopping in.

Read Full Post »

Spring Runoff

Everywhere I go these days I run into water. Sometimes literally-like absentmindedly finding myself ankle deep in a puddle-but usually I see it rushing down hillsides and across trails, as if its very existence depended on it finding the lowest point in the valley as quickly as possible.

Since the days of film cameras I’ve had the opinion that blurred water in a photo simply showed the photographer’s skill in manipulating the camera’s controls, but otherwise served no useful purpose.  I’ve had to revise that opinion recently because in photos of little rivulets like this one the water was so clear that it became almost invisible if it wasn’t blurred.  My opinion has therefore been upgraded to useful, but easily overdone.

 

These mushrooms grew on a fallen tree near a stream and were as soft as velvet and wiggled like Jell-O, and they reminded me of cookies. (I hadn’t had lunch yet.)

 

Many bracket fungi are polypores and have pores on their undersides. These had gills and a short, off-center stalk, so they aren’t true bracket fungi and they aren’t polypores. Now I know a few things about what they aren’t, but I haven’t been able to identify them to discover what they are.

Way up in the hills small rivulets join forces and become bigger streams that fall down the hillsides. These streams might run for a week, a month, or a few months but few of them run year-round. The water in this photo wasn’t blurred. At least, not intentionally.

 

All along the streams and rivers red maples (Acer rubrum) are blooming. Here the male blossoms are showing pollen. Even though I became an allergy sufferer at age 50 I still love seeing the trees bloom in spring.

 

The female flowers of red maple (Acer rubrum) are just opening-waiting for the wind to bring pollen from the male blossoms.

All the water running off the hillsides has to go somewhere, and in this case it causes this small brook to swell and fill its banks. In high summer you can walk across this brook in places while barely wetting your ankles. This is called Beaver Brook after the many beavers that once lived here.

Sometimes when I walk through these forests it is easy to imagine the immense wilderness that faced the first colonists. I wonder how they felt when they first realized that, as far as they knew, this forest stretched on indefinitely.  If I think back even farther I can imagine Native Americans living in a true paradise so alluring that many early colonists “rescued from the savages” didn’t want to return to what their race called civilization.

The brook tumbles through a small gorge before spilling over Beaver Brook Falls with a roar. The falls are fairly impressive at this time of year, but they look quite different in July and August.

I haven’t seen many turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) over the past winter. I saw a lot of dried out ones with washed out colors, but very few with color like those in the photo. As I’ve said before, these fungi have a lot of secrets and they don’t give them up easily. Every time I see them I’m reminded of how little I really know about them.

With all of the water from all of the surrounding hills spilling into it, the Ashuelot River is feeling pretty powerful these days, and it is. The eerie booming sounds coming from the boulders and debris that it rolls along its bottom can be felt as well as heard. Almost like thunder, it rolls through you.

So far this year the Ashuelot has held all of the thousands of gallons of runoff water within its banks. From here it will travel to the Connecticut River and then to the Long Island Sound where it will spill into the Atlantic Ocean. Once it evaporates into the atmosphere it might return and give us some welcome summer rain.

Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything – even mountains, rivers, plants and trees – should be your teacher. ~Morihei Ueshiba

Thanks for coming by.

Read Full Post »