According to many sources, today is roughly the middle of the heating season, although there’s the more pessimistic old adage that says you need to still have half your wood and half your hay on Candlemas Day, which is February 2nd.

/in , /by
You might also like
The hard-won snowless ground got a sprinkled coat of snow overnight. The juncos are easy to see now, but still too many to count.
Most of us have heard that the CO2 level in Earth’s atmosphere today is higher than it’s been in a million years, but a new study, published in Geology, concludes that there’s now more CO2 than there has been in the past 23 million years. Something to think about while we fan ourselves.
Each firefly species has its own flash pattern, a preferred habitat, and a preferred time of the night. After deciding that the one that flashes quickly 4 or 5 times and streaks just above the grasses at dusk was Photuris fairchildi, I looked it up and have had to back off. Turns out that those little beetles are harder to identify than I thought.
The leaves of sugar maple seedlings don’t look at all like maple leaves. They have no lobes or very small lobes at best. You can see the seed leaves, the cotyledons, below. Last year’s seedlings are very small but they have maple shaped leaves – and no cotyledons. Plenty of both this year.
Luckily, singing season for the veery lasts a long time. They’re still at it, mostly in the mornings and evenings.
Starflower (Trientalis borealis) is a 4-inch high plant that doesn’t last very long and has small flowers, typically just one or two. The leaves are in a whorl, commonly of seven leaves and the small white flowers usually have seven petals. I don’t know of any other plants that grow in sevens, but maybe there are some. Another feature of starflower that is unusual is the flower stalks: at about an inch long, they are as slender as a fine thread. You can barely see them.
Snowy owls have recently been seen in Vermont. We’ve all heard that they leave their arctic home when food there is scarce but another reason for these erratic irruptions might instead be that they occur following an unusually successful breeding season – successful because of an abundance of prey.
Our dog flushed a grouse off a nest containing just three eggs this morning. Grouse normally incubate 9 to 14 eggs but when, after shooing off the dog, I reached into the brush pile to straighten out the situation, the eggs were warm, suggesting that this female was calling it quits at three.