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.

/in , /by
You might also like
Turtles are crossing roads. If conditions permit, a helping hand might keep one of them from being hit by a careless vehicle.
If you have a flashlight and a bit more patience than I have, I think you could see squash plants grow. Overnight they leapt through the garden fence and onto the grass.
Yesterday’s thunderstorm brought an inch of rain to the village about 2 miles from here and just a fleeting dampness here. An unwelcome but not unfamiliar occurrence.
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.
The berries of red baneberry are ripe, shiny, and bright. But they are named baneberry for a reason.
All the other spring ephemerals are flowering. Among the loveliest are Dutchman’s breeches, trout lily, toothwort. I could go on, they all are lovely.
Chickadees are beginning to sing their “hey sweetie” songs.
Sometimes, in the middle of the fronds of interrupted ferns, the leaflets are fertile and produce spores. Now these spore-producing leaflets are almost black and look as though they are deformed in some way. Not very attractive, but functionally they are fine. Just interrupted.