Spring arrives to fog

Fog rules the morning here on Roundtop Mtn. Oh, and spring has arrived. Last night I heard the honking of a huge and high flock of migrating Canada geese. The sound is distinctive and different from the everyday honking of the geese.

I suspect the height of the flock has something to do with it, as well as the sheer number of geese. They honk continuously when they migrate, as though the flock is a traveling cocktail party with everyone talking at the same time. And they do sound happy, or at least eager, to be heading north again.

Then this morning, I heard the call of a killdeer or two. These birds are early arrivers, too. A few will nest in the stone parking lots at Roundtop, but for most the mountain is just a stop on their longer trip.

Together, hearing the migrating calls of geese and those of the killdeer, the evidence is irrefutable. Spring is here, if only as yet in its infancy.

End of the walk

After I played in nature’s moss garden for a while, I headed further along the stream and deeper up the valley. Baby Dog liked this part of our walk much better. She never did figure out what I found so interesting about that moss. Sniffing every leaf on the ground was more her style. Although she doesn’t look like one, that girl seems to think she is a bloodhound.

When I first started my walk on Sunday, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to walk through the entire valley. Since the ground isn’t frozen, I was afraid it might be muddy and sloppy, as it often is after spring rains, but the mud remained at a level that wasn’t unpleasant for me or for a dog who doesn’t like to get her toes wet, let alone muddy.
The woods are still quiet, winter quiet. Every now and then I’d hear the pileated woodpeckers fussing and arguing in the distance. A red-tailed hawk screamed overhead. The jays were occasionally intrigued by our passing. Those sounds were occasional. Mostly it was quiet, and our footfalls made more noise than I heard throughout the forest.

Baby Dog enjoys this walk, a change from our daily morning routine. It’s too dark and too far to walk this route during the mornings. Soon, too soon on such a beautiful day, we have walked the length of the valley and have reached the point where I must turn back up the mountain and return to the cabin. Our late winter walk has come to an end.

A moss walk

First off, I can report that Baby Dog has no interest in mosses. So she couldn’t figure out why I kept stopping on “her” walk to look at them. I, however, think mosses are very neat things, even more so in winter when they aren’t competing with equally neat flowers and birds and bugs and such.

The first photo is of cushion moss. It’s growing off the edge of a bank and reminds me of a water fall. My moss identification skills are pretty poor, partly because there are a lot of different mosses that are very similar, but mostly because good moss identification guides are tough to come by. And moss species are quite variable even in small areas, unlike birds where a guide to the eastern U.S. covers everything you will see in that region. For a moss guide to be really accurate, you’d probably have to have several for the average state, either that or a really big book.

 

The next photo is of feather moss, I think. This is one of the identifications I’m not sure of. My photo looks close to that, anyway, so that’s what I’m calling it until someone else tells me something different.

The last photo shows the moss spores. Now here’s where I think the mild winter is showing up in the landscape. Moss spores typically arrive in late March or April. Here we are a few days before the end of February and those spores are out there and ready to go. I think this may be the first actual sign of spring and its early arrival that I’ve found.

Spring arrives in the small things first, though I am usually too busy looking for the big things to notice them. I’m looking for birds and wildflowers, but I guess I should be looking more at moss to tell me when spring is arriving.

Back in business!

 Sunday dawned sunny and calm, a blessed relief after the brutal winds of Saturday. Time for a walk through the forest to see what late non-winter, early spring looks like. Baby Dog was my companion, a guinea pig for the new hands-free leash system I’d just gotten. With Baby Dog tied around my waist, I could carry both my hiking stick and my camera.

The weather was seasonably chilly, especially during the pre-noon hours. I noticed only the sun and its increasing warmth, far warmer than the sun of just a month or so ago. I wanted to see if the warm winter had sparked any signs of new spring growth, even though it is still very early. Baby Dog wanted to sniff her way from one end of the mountain to the other. It was a good mix.

Looking across to Nell’s Hill, the vista looks as wintry as ever, considering there is no snow. The trees are still sleeping, and even the buds aren’t yet enlarged. Grasses are brown and flattened. The landscape is largely silent, at least until three pileated woodpeckers got into a shouting match. I never could decide if they were alarming at me or were fighting among themselves. Three crow-sized black-and-white birds screaming through the forest are ear-splitting.

We hadn’t gone very far before six deer tiptoed and then bounced along in front of us. They all looked brown and healthy. These deer had an easy time of it this winter, though they aren’t fat. I suspect that even during a mild winter a diet of dead, brown grass and the few acorns that fell last fall doesn’t have much nutritional value.

At the bottom of the abandoned ski slope, we turned north and reached a pond, as always unfrozen. Water is pumped out of this pond for snowmaking, so the water never freezes. Even without that, the pond would be late freezing as it is both deep and spring-fed. In summer the edge of the pond is dense with cattails and other moisture-loving plants and is a great spot to watch butterflies that are attracted by thistle and the mud along the water’s edge. I look for skunk cabbage, among the earliest and arguably the largest of the new spring growth. I don’t see any.

After the pond, we walk along an old woods road. I notice that I can see deeper into the forest than I’m used to. The lack of underbrush means I can better see the topography of the land, see rock outcroppings that I normally can’t, see a small draw across a creek that bears investigating on some future day.

The stream that flows through the narrow valley is running and pretty full, if not as full as after spring rains. The ground is soft but not muddy. In April the area is often too wet for walking in hiking boots, and even with Wellies or rubber boots, the ground can be so mushy that I can easily sink 3-4 inches. I usually just avoid the area then, waiting for the drier weather that will come after.

Baby Dog isn’t sure about the new leash. She wants to stop and sniff everything, and I want to keep walking. She’s like a kid in a candy store, and I’m not letting her buy any candy. We move deeper into the forest, her lagging behind as always. I reach an area where mosses are thick and lush, a haven of greenery in the brown. I’ll post photos from that part of our walk tomorrow.

Murphy's Law

 While it has always been true that nothing ever goes as planned and Murphy’s Law reigns supreme, I think both must be even more true in this technological age of ours. Things break.

Our ancestors had the same problem, I’m sure, if on a different level. What do you do when a wheel to the horse wagon breaks? Well, if you’re in town it’s probably nothing more than an afternoon’s hassle, but if you’re between towns or out on the frontier somewhere, that accident can suddenly become life-threatening.

Today we have more technology than ever, both appliances and electronics. We have tons of that stuff. When it works, it’s wonderful and time-saving. When it doesn’t, all that time-saving goes down the drain, and we spend time trying to get it fixed or getting a new one. Given the amount of technology we have, sometimes keeping everything in good repair feels like its own full-time job.

Today it’s the USB cord that I use to download photos from my camera to the computer, which means I can take all the photos I want, but I currently have no way to get them out of the camera. I’ve ordered a new cord but until it arrives early next week I won’t be posting any new photos. Sometime this weekend I will likely dig out an old point and shoot camera that I haven’t used in years and see if I can make that work again temporarily.

So in the meantime, I’m posting a few photos of what a winter should really look like, just so we don’t forget.

 

A little greenery

With 60 degree weather in February, I almost expect to see leaves popping out at any second. Apparently, the leaves know better, as I see no evidence of popping. Even the grass is still brown and brittle. So the only green things around are the mosses and lichens, such as this moss-covered tree.

The temperatures are so balmy that I have look up into the night sky, just to make sure the winter constellation Orion the Hunter is still there and not replaced by spring’s Leo the Lion.

In a normal winter, I would be thinking that snow, even a big snow, is still possible in March. A March snow doesn’t usually last very long here, but this year, I don’t see much potential for a March snow. Even though long-range forecasts are notoriously wrong, the temperature forecasts aren’t even close to being able to produce snow. Winter is done. The only real question is how long will it take for spring to arrive?

Not winter, not spring

Every day I watch the sun rise earlier and set later. A minute here, a minute there and soon the difference is a large one. The sky is no longer pitch black when I get home. Before long, the chickens will still be awake (and will need attention) in the evenings.

When I walk Dog in the mornings by the time we are through, I can see the barest hint of orange color in the east. Overhead, the stars are dimming and what was once a velvety black showcase for nature’s diamonds is now a steel blue.

Canada geese call every morning from over on the new pond. They are raucous and I can tell they are chasing each other around, trying to find the best nest sites and chase off interlopers and upstarts. A great horned owl calls from somewhere distant, perhaps over on the next ridge.

Not even the skunk cabbage is breaking through the ground just yet, but the first hint of green can’t be far off. The days are untypically warm for this time of year. The nights sometimes drop below freezing, sometimes well below freezing, but sometimes never make it below that mark at all. It’s that time of the year I should rename the time of many coats. I never know from morning to night which coat will be needed, the light jacket, the raincoat with lining, the heavier jacket I wear in all but the coldest weather. Sometimes I need all three on the same day.

I still can’t smell the spring, though the ground is not frozen. Spring has its own pure smell. I think of it as a smell of new life and fresh earth. The earth is fresh on this late February morning, but I’m starting to think the germinating seeds know enough not to break out of their loamy beds and reach for the sun just yet. Perhaps next week.