A perfect day for apple tree pruning. Not too cold, not too sunny, and just a little snow left.

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The height of the severed plants in your garden can give a clue to the culprit. Rodents leave roughly inch-tall stumps. Cottontails between 2 and 3 inches. Mature deer between 12 and 16 inches.
Barred owls make noise all night long but they feed most actively at dawn and dusk; sometimes well after dawn and well before dusk.
The big damselflies called ebony jewelwing make it hard to walk the brook any faster than at a snail’s pace. The black wings of the males are pretty, but it’s their shining emerald abdomens that stop you in your tracks. They occur in masses here along the top of a new beaver dam.
The green frog eggs laid at the warm edges of our pond hatched in about three days and the tiny tadpoles are nowhere to be seen.
The year of the toad? They seem to be everywhere, all sizes, and now trilling from ponds.
Now that the wasps have filled all the ground holes in all the electrical outlets in the garage, they’ve begun using the fancy solitary bee and wasp apartment house that was made of reeds especially for them. The female lays an egg, tucks in provisions for the larva, and fills the hole with fine mud, without my noticing. I’ll try to catch her in action from now on.
Most evergreen perennials are low to the ground, for good reason. Winterberry, pippsissewa, partridgeberry, and goldthread are all in the carpet family.
Bears have been digging up jack-in-the-pulpits throughout the hardwood parts of our land. They make neat, clean little cone-shaped holes and only eat the big plants. The small jacks that so often surround the parent plants remain – until next year.