Losing daylight

Curious eastern cottontail rabbit

Midsummer is here and already I must think about taking a headlamp when I leave for an early morning walk with my dogs. This morning was overcast, which only emphasized what is soon upon me; the days already grow shorter. 

Fleeing

The need for a headlamp is noticeable as I start my morning walks. We begin our walk in the forest, with its thick canopy of summer leaves. It is dark in a summer forest, darker than during winter’s longer nights, when the trees are bare and my view of the sky is unobstructed. Once we leave the sheltering dark of the woods, the pre-dawn sky is pale enough for easy walking.
 

I am always surprised by how this change in the day’s light sneaks up on me. I know it is coming but I never expect it "today." This morning was my reminder, my wake-up call, that a headlamp is soon needed. Tomorrow, if the sky is undimmed by morning clouds, I will have a brief respite before the headlamp is truly needed again. But by next week, even with a clear sky, the headlamp will again become a morning fixture on our walks.

What's coming next?

Though the temperature doesn’t show much improvement over mid-winter, the increasing minutes of daylight and the stronger sun angle tell me spring is approaching.  And it’s not just me:  rabbit tracks are suddenly appearing around my forest, the bluebirds are active again, and though I haven’t seen one up on the mountain, down off the hill I saw a very large groundhog yesterday.  Finally, after taking the winter off, the hens are beginning, just beginning, to lay again.

Sooner or later the temperature will catch up.

Later on in the spring it will be fun to observe what, if any, differences this cold and extended winter produces in the forest.  Will the trees leaf out later than they have over the past several years? Will it be a good warbler year because the warbler/insect cycle will be in sync again for the first time in a while? Will the winter weather alter when the bloodroot makes its one-day blooming appearance? There will be lots to keep an eye on this year, and I’m going to enjoy it all!

A few tracks

I had a tiny bit of snow from that big nor’easter that rolled up the east coast the other night. So I’ve had some nice fresh snow to look at the tracks of the animals that I share the forest with. Partly because I’ve been holed up in the cabin to avoid the ice that has covered the ground for the past week or so, I haven’t been out as much as I usually am. The animals, too, hole up somewhat so we are more likely to miss seeing each other than is normal. But they’re still around.

The fresh snow is great for seeing the tracks they make and reassure me that the animals are still around and doing okay. This first set is the red fox, who routinely travels down the lane. This one is moving at a nice comfortable pace, likely that easy-going trot they use most of the time.

Snow isn’t the best medium for observing tracks, and powdery snow isn’t even the best of that. The slightest bit of wind or sun will start to deform the shape of the track. The track furthest on the left is the one where you can most clearly see the shape of the fox’s footprint, especially the two claws at the top of the track.

The next two tracks are both rabbits, the first is one where the rabbit is just hopping along the way rabbits do. In the second photo the front and back feet are spaced further apart, which means the rabbit was moving faster than in the first set. The rabbit tracks are also in the lane up the mountain, quite close to the fox tracks, and I have to wonder if the rabbit bolted to avoid the fox (whose visible tracks don’t show that it speeded up).

I saw other tracks too—deer, raccoon and a mouse or vole I couldn’t identify. It doesn’t take much snow for mouse tracks to be hard for me to identify. Half an inch or so and their little bellies and feet are dragging through the snow, deforming their own tracks as they move along.

In any event, a quick walk around the cabin tells me a lot about which residents are around and awake and what they’re doing while I’m inside staying warm during the long, dark evenings.

What's this about?

I thought an arty-type snow photo of this pretty, old stone bridge along Beaver Creek would be a good addition to my early snow photos. The bridge and the dirt road beyond it is closed for all but private use, and I just love the look of the straight lane disappearing into the woods. But as is so often the case, once I got to the bridge, I saw something more interesting than a simple arty-type photo.

Can you see it? Look at the bridge itself. Rabbit tracks hop along the length of it. The sides of the bridge are about 2.5 feet high, though they are somewhat sloped where the it starts. Sometime after the little mini-snow fell, a rabbit jumped up on the bridge and followed the wide stone side of it for the entire length of the bridge. What’s that about?

This rabbit could easily have crossed the bridge and stayed firmly on the ground. Instead, it decided to take the route with a view. I can’t help but wonder why it did. What was going through that little rabbit brain? I would have guessed it would be more easily seen up there by the red-tailed hawks that patrol the valley. In any event, this particular rabbit followed the edge of the bridge, hopped off at the end and disappeared into where I didn’t follow.

I am left with yet another of nature’s mysteries, one I will never solve. I enjoy the idea of a curious rabbit with a hankering to explore its world from a different point of view and taking the chance to do so when the opportunity presented itself.

Cottontail rabbits are common around the cabin, but this year they seem even more numerous than usual. It’s typical to see 6-8 of them right now on every walk with the dogs, much to the delight of the dogs. Most of these will likely be dead by fall. Everything from mosquito-borne disease to predation to accidents will reduce their population substantially by late summer. In the wild, few live longer than a year, with annual death rates estimated at 75-80% of the population. Their lifespan could be 3-4 years but that rarely happens.

Rabbits are mostly nocturnal, and I most often see them in the early morning and late evening. They like to hide in brushpiles and will eat a wide variety of vegetation, consuming about 40% of their 2-3 pound weight each day.

This morning Dog and I walked up very close to one before it spooked. I didn’t see it before it ran, and I don’t think Dog did either. When it took off, so did Dog. Rabbits normally have a zig-zag escape pattern. This one had more of a circle, which meant Dog circled me several times while chasing the rabbit, an event of historic importance in his life. The more usual pattern of our rabbit encounters is that a rabbit takes off, Dog runs to the end of the flexi-lead, nearly pulls my arm out of its socket and rabbit disappears into the brush. Since this rabbit circled, Dog kept chasing for seconds longer than usual, and the best part of all, is that my arm remained securely in its socket. I’m pretty sure the rabbit circled me about three times. Eventually, of course, the rabbit did disappear into the brush, but by then Dog was running out of steam so no arm jerking came at the end of this encounter. He sure was one happy Dog, though.