Earliest warblers, just before trees leaf out: yellow-rumped, pine, palm, black-throated green, black and white, Louisiana waterthrush.

While mesmerized at a vernal pool yesterday, I saw caddisfly larvae appearing to nibble at wood frog eggs. Today I saw the same thing in another pool and though I haven’t quite been able to verify this, caddisflies are known to eat salamander eggs. I’ll be publishing a ground-breaking article on this soon. Stay tuned.

Bitterns have been heard pounding in fence posts over the past few days. Not really, but the weird glonk glonk noise they make sounds a bit like someone driving in a post.

Canada geese bugging you? I’ve been told that if you string aluminum pie plates on a rope across your pond, they will leave – for someone else’s pond.

The brilliantly purple female flowers of beaked hazelnut are so tiny that you need a magnifying glass – or your binoculars backwards. It’s worth a close look.

The question mark is the largest of the anglewing butterflies. The beautiful adults overwinter and rarely visit flowers. Instead, they can now be seen seeking out carrion, rotten fruit, dung, and the nutrients found in puddles.

Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are beginning to return from points south. They lap up sap from holes in trees that they have drilled in the past few days and will eat any insects the sap has attracted.

Bluebirds have begun making decisions about where to build a nest. They check out the ones in our yard every year but usually settle on someplace else.

Spring is frustratingly slow this year – which really is no different from spring’s arrival every year. We have to remind ourselves…

Coltsfoot is one of the earliest wildflowers. Brought from Europe for use as a cough remedy, it has found a niche here in wet gravel at the edges of roads. It is less welcome in wetlands, where it displaces native species.