The year of the toad? They seem to be everywhere, all sizes, and now trilling from ponds.

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First outdoor lunch; no jackets needed.
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.
Record high temperatures for May were recorded in Burlington (95°) and Saint Johnsbury (92°). On the top of Mount Mansfield it hit 85°. That’s the warmest temperature ever recorded there, on any month, according to a National Weather Service tweet. Fact-check pending.
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.
If you’re working outdoors in the heat of the day, consider taking some switchel with you: roughly three cups of cider vinegar in ¾ of a gallon of water, plus some honey and some ginger. Cider vinegar supplies potassium and the ginger helps potassium absorption. Honey both revives your energy and reduces the tartness. Variations of this concoction have been used by farm workers since before the Civil War.
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.
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.
Snowshoe hare are packing down their main trails. Single-use paths peel off in what looks to be a random way, but there may be a plan.