The ground beneath female white ash trees is littered with seeds. Almost white, they look fresh and optimistic. Makes me think there’s hope.

/in , /by
You might also like
Daily check of the broad-winged hawk nest near our house, high in a maple tree, sometimes reveals a head on the nest and sometimes a tail; the incubating female taking in the view from both directions, as she sits there for 28 to 31 days, giving new perspective to our present stay-at-home situation.
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.
Jefferson salamanders are the earliest vernal pool visitors, arriving even when there’s lots of ice.
Chickadees are beginning to sing their “hey sweetie” songs.
Hummingbirds can distinguish many more colors than humans. Not just ultraviolet, but ultraviolet+green, ultraviolet+red, and ultraviolet+yellow. Researchers spent three summers deploying sugar of various hues to discover this. We are “color-blind compared to birds” according to one of the scientists. And, according to me, it’s good to clean out the hummingbird feeder before it gets moldy.
Insect frass all over your picnic table this year? You’re not alone. Matt Ayers, an ecologist at Dartmouth is happy to see them. He writes that caterpillar abundance fluctuates by 20-fold, depending on the year. It’s all good, not an outbreak, and many different species of caterpillar are providing food for birds this year.
Ah, ticks. Tick repellent, pants stuffed into socks, tick checks, tick phobia. But staying indoors is not an option at this time of year.
Now that the ground has really frozen, some of us can cross a few jobs that we didn’t quite get to off the list.