Every spring is different

Rue anemone at sunset

As if the budding trees and blooming wildflowers weren’t enough, I can tell it’s spring by the amount of sounds in the forest around my cabin.  The sound of wild turkeys gobbling, the sound of a fox barking,  the call of the phoebes and Carolina wrens, the rush of wind through the trees—all of this is quite a change from the quiet of winter.  For some reason I’m still not used to all the spring sounds yet.  The season sounds noisy to me.

Or perhaps it’s only that I can no longer filter out sounds the way I used to, the way I imagine people who live in cities do.  Or even towns.  It’s hard to hear the forest for all the noise going on inside it right now.  And it will only get louder as more of the summer resident birds arrive and start singing for a mate.

In winter the sounds of even a quiet footfall or a distant limb breaking and falling somewhere let me know what’s going on around these woods.  But now I hear so many other things that I can’t hear those more distant or quiet sounds anymore.  I suppose this happens every spring, but for some reason I’m noticing it more this year.

Every spring some things are different, even in the same forest.  This year the rue anemone are thicker than I’ve ever seen them . The forest across from my cabin is so thick with them that I don’t dare walk over there, as I could not avoid stepping on them. There must be hundreds of plants, looking almost like little cotton balls strewn across the forest floor.

And yet, I didn’t have any bloodroot this spring, and I found only a few hepatica plants.  Already the trout lilies are done blooming, and the leaves of the purple violets are just appearing.  The forest is ever-changing, season by season and year by year.  Even in the same place.

This and that

The chickens are on lockdown for the moment, and officially they are Not Happy.  At 4:30 a.m. this morning I was awakened by the sound of a barking red fox—the first I’ve heard in months. It sounded as though the fox was in my driveway.  An hour or so later when Baby Dog and I were taking our morning walk, I heard the barking again, this time more distantly.  

I will let the chickens out this evening when I get home, so they can be outside for a few hours until dusk.  Foxes are usually active at night, though sometimes are seen during the day.  It’s those early morning and early evening hours that are the most critical, but with the fox prowling so close to the cabin, I’m not going to take any chances for a while. 

This probably also means I won’t get any unbroken eggs for a while. The girls have taken to laying their eggs in the old chicken coop that I don’t use any longer but which I haven’t gotten rid of yet.   Instead of laying eggs in their own coop’s nest boxes, they have decided to sleep in those cozy little nooks. So if they are forced to lay there today, I imagine the eggs will get broken before I get home. 

In other chicken news, one of my girls laid a fairy egg a day or so ago.  It’s the first one I’ve ever had.  Fairy eggs, also called witch eggs, happen occasionally.  Usually it’s when a hen is interrupted in her laying process for a day.  It might have even been the day Baby Dog scared one of the hens when the two met unexpectedly at the corner of the cabin.  Fairy eggs won’t have a yolk, so this one will get tossed out, but it’s still kind of interesting to see. 

Dogwood sunset

With spring already two-thirds gone, I should not be surprised at how many blooms are already fading.  Dogwood, though near its peak when I took this photo at the beginning of the weekend, is already today past its prime.  The redbud has gone to green, leaving nothing but twisted trees that look, even to my eye, as though they should be cut down before they infect the rest of the forest with some terrible disease.

And with the loss of some comes the first blooms of others.  The first of the wild geraniums, a delicate shade of lavender far prettier than that of their tamer, more garish cousins, are budding and almost blooming.  Perhaps this evening the blooms will be fully opened.

The first geese have produced three tiny goslings.  Another goose, one I have dubbed Mrs. Hiss, is still on her eggs.  She has chosen, rather poorly, to build her nest not 6 feet off the road around the pond near my cabin.  Every time a car goes by she stands up off her nest and hisses ferociously.  As nest choice goes, it’s a pretty terrible one.

It's spring flower week!

Rue anemone

 

The forest’s first, tiny ephemeral flowers are blooming at Roundtop. In addition to the yellow dog-toothed violets I found several days ago, I’ve now added bloodwort, rue anemone and coltsfoot. All of these flowers are small and easy to overlook.

Coltsfoot

Coltsfoot is the most obvious of the three new species I found yesterday, and even that one is easy to overlook. The flower looks so much like dandelion that I believe a lot of people overlook it because of that. But though the flowers are similar, the similarity ends there. Coltsfoot is taller that most dandelions and the plant flowers before you find any leaves. Often, it is the first new flower I find in the spring, but not this year.

Bloodwort is another tiny plant. The flowers are about half an inch and the waxy, clover-shaped leaves are perhaps 2-3 inches. An entire plant may be only 3-4 inches long. I found just two plants of this one, within 4-5 feet of each other. Likely, there are more that I haven’t found yet.

Rue anemone is a common plant in my forest. Every year I have multiple plants that vary in shade from white to a nice lavender. This plant is no larger than bloodwort but it grows much more densely, and I often find 10-12 plants in one area. Even a tiny flower is hard to overlook when so many are grouped together.



Bloodwort

Finding spring’s first flowers is a true sign of spring, along with the appearance of that lovely little Eastern blue butterfly. This weekend I also had golden-crowned kinglets, ruby kinglets and a pair of very curious blue-gray gnatcatchers. For the first time this year, I finally feel confident that I can finally put those snow shovels away!

Early spring forest

Rue Anemone

This must be flower week for Roundtop. The spring ephemerals are popping up all over the forest. Today’s flower is rue anemone, which has gone from just a few blooms to dozens, if not hundreds of them, all around the mountain. These are small plants, no more than 4-5 inches tall, and if you are not careful, you can easily step on them. This was a nice little bunch of them. Often, only a single flower is seen or perhaps two. Sometimes I come across a small patch of them, where I will find 6-8 blooms scattered in an area of perhaps 5 ft. x 3 ft. Even then they are not always easy to spot.

Other than the small flowers on the forest floor, the overall view around the forest as a whole does not look particularly spring-like. Some trees have buds that look suspiciously large, but many are still as bare as winter. The other evening I walked deep into the forest and sat for a while, enjoying the warm weather. Wind through the trees made the most sound. A few crows called in the distance and one pileated woodpecker, but that was all.

The chorus of woodland birds was silent, so I listened to the wind and enjoyed the view from my perch on a conveniently-located boulder. In a few short weeks, the forest will be so lush that I won’t be able to see very far. But last evening, from my boulder along the edge of the mountain’s side, I could see both above the forest canopy and the forest floor below me, the ground rolling away to bottom out along Beaver Creek. That expansive view won’t last much longer, so I wanted to enjoy it one last time or perhaps the next to last time before the vegetation hides it until late fall.

For the moment, the forest spring is best seen in the small and up-close plants that are pushing through the detritus of last fall’s leaves. The large plants of the forest still have a ways to go before they reflect much of the new season.

What replaces "yard" work at the cabin

"Bouquet" of rue anemone

This week I’ve spent some time each evening dragging around giant branches, tops of trees and cutting back the multiflora rose that’s not-so-slowly taking over the area behind the cabin. This spring the clean-up is worse than usual. The remnants from Snowtober still litter the woods, and not just around my cabin.

Those downed treetops have dried a bit, and I’m now able to drag them around a lot easier than I could shortly after the event. They are still large and heavy. One that looks like at least half of a tree, keeps getting lodged between other living trees as I try to drag it away from the side of the cabin. I moved it another 10-15 feet before it got stuck. I think I’m going to need a chain saw to move it any further. Or perhaps I’ll just sharpen the hatchet and try that. At least that 20-foot monster is no longer up against the cabin.

Cutting back the multiflora rose, that gorgeous invasive and thorny bush, is an ongoing issue. This year, I saw the start of the growth and moved in quickly. Then in 24 hours the size of the patch doubled. Last night when I wore out after dragging limbs and treetops around, I worked on that for a while.

The forest still comes right up to the doors and decks of the cabin, but I have to keep working with the brush to keep the forest from covering the cabin. As it is, last year I got behind in my brush clearing when the rains of April went on and on, and I never did catch up. It was a jungle back there, and I couldn’t even walk through it. This year, I’m trying to prevent that from happening. We’ll see if I’m successful or not. So far I’m almost holding my own against it.

More explosions

 After a warm and sunny week, the weekend at Roundtop was a washout—until around 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon when the sun finally appeared. At that point, it was too late to do much exploring in the woods, and everything was still wet and dripping anyway. I did, however, retire to the back deck and spend an hour or so enjoying the feel of the sun on my neck.



I also saw the northbound migration of several black vultures, with a few turkey vultures that did not appear to be local adding to the mix. A red-tailed hawk that may or may not have been a local bird circled in a northbound direction, too. But the real drama came from the local pileated and red-bellied woodpeckers who were involved in a screeching match over something. 



The pileated woodpeckers circled around the cabin, causing an awful racket. They would disappear, still screeching, to the north only to circle around from the south and swoop through the forest again, still raucous. The red-bellied woodpecker mostly ignored the pileated woodpeckers, holding its ground on a dead limb. When the pileated swooped by, the red-bellied would toss off some woodpeckery and possibly vulgar retort, and the whole drama would begin again. Who ever said the woods are quiet?



More flowers popped up in the woods, with coltsfoot, which is normally the earliest of the blooms, finally making an appearance. My favorite local fern, still growing out of a crack in a boulder along the edge of the lane to the cabin, has begun to unfurl its fronds. The rue anemone (or is it a spring beauty?) is blooming as well. When the leaves are no more unfurled than these are, I can’t tell the two apart, even when I have an identification guide in my hands.



The trees are beginning to leaf out, even up on Roundtop Mtn. Down in the valley and off the mountain, there’s no “beginning” about the leafing. They are out and are a good 6 weeks earlier than they should be, to boot. 

Step carefully! Forest underfoot

Most years I don’t have to watch where I put my every step when I’m in the woods. This year the wildflowers are so profuse that I pretty much have to. The rue anemone are especially thick this year, which is particularly impressive when you remember that one plant is rarely more than 4-6 inches across.

Last evening on my evening walk I came across several patches with 50 or more flowers, all in bloom. Many more patches produced 20+ blooms, and the space between patches was usually only a few feet.

Last year the wild geraniums were the showstopper. This year it is the anemone. The geraniums are out, and with more to come, but I’m not finding nearly as many as I did last year. The first mayapples are nearly out, if not yet fully in bloom.

It’s interesting to me to pay attention to the variations in wildflowers from year to year. Weather conditions, snow cover, rains, warmer or cooler temperatures—each slight change favors one flower over another in that year. This year had a very snowy winter followed by a very early and warm March (and now a cooler and drier April). The anemone liked that combination. Last year was a nearly snowless winter with a cool spring, and the wild geraniums were thrilled.

The enormous biodiversity of the native eastern forest can cope with a wide variety of weather, and responds with subtle variations in its flora just as quickly. That’s part of what makes a forest so interesting to me. A forest is never the same, not from year to year or month to month and sometimes not even from morning to night. Still, a visitor does have to look to see the differences. Skimming your eyes across the trees isn’t going to capture those differences, and it’s these tiny differences, I believe, that make the whole of a forest so precious.