More than a little rain

The forest is greener than green and the cabin’s surrounds are muddy. Torrents of rain fell yesterday evening, a real gullywasher. This morning I carefully pick my way around the cabin and Roundtop, trying to avoid the worst of the mud. It’s the kind of morning where being squeamish isn’t going to do you any good. You will get muddy. It will get on your shoes and your pants. Even with boots. April showers in June indeed.

Baby Dog and I don’t wander far off a trail or a road, and still we come home muddy. Baby Dog does not like baths any better than she likes mud, so that makes for a struggle. The rain doesn’t seem to have slowed down the more feral residents of my mountain. I heard one of the red foxes barking not long before the deluge last night. The raccoon was still out and about, though as a nursing mother raccoon, she has mp choice. She has to be.

A rain-soaked deer sprang up in front of me by one of the snowmaking ponds, dashed across the road, paralleled my walking route, and then circled around, still at a full run, to get to the opposite side of the pond and head up the slopes. I see what I think is this same doe every morning, either by the pond or down on one of the dirt roads. I’m pretty sure she’s hiding a fawn somewhere nearby, so her big circle was designed to take her back towards wherever the little one was hidden. I have a rough idea where that is, down to within perhaps a hundred yards. I don’t feel the need to disturb the fawn just to see if I’m right.

More rain is in the forecast. We need it, as the area is still below where it should be for rainfall. But I’m not looking forward to more mud.

Thaw

Likely this thaw won’t last. It’s not uncommon to have a January thaw in this area that lasts for several days or a week. We didn’t have a January thaw this year. It waited until February for that. If this thaw lasts more than a week or so, it will be both unusual and cause for concern. Rising sap could cause the buds to appear and everything from fruit trees to dogwood blossoms could then be damaged or destroyed when the weather returns to normal again.

But for a few days, I won’t worry about that just yet. For now, it was enough to be out in the sun on a warm day and enjoy a vacation from winter without ever leaving the area. At this point, one or two days into the thaw, there’s no sign of spring. There’s simply mud and decaying leaves, wet and flattened from weeks of being covered by snow and ice. This is a good thing. It means last year’s leaves are already turning into forest loam. Some years, when it is dry through the winter, last year’s leaves greet the spring still crunchy and not much decayed. A normally wet and snowy winter moves that process along nicely.

The other thing I noticed is the number of trees with marcescent leaves, such as those in today’s photo. In this area, that pretty much means I’m looking at a lot of American beech trees, though a very few others, often oak, will have them, too. Marcesence simply means that the trees hold on to their leaves until the new leaves push them off in the spring. Sometimes, as the new leaves are just starting to come out, you’ll see both the new leaves and last year’s leaves on the same tree.

Scientists argue about what causes marcesence and whether its effects are positive or negative. Sometimes one will say the effect is positive when another calls the same effect negative. I find their arguments interesting but so far have found nothing in them to get overly concerned about. Here on Roundtop, marcesence on beech trees simply is a normal way of the forest’s life.

New Arrivals

Weather extremes and oddities continue on the mountain this weekend, though by now, I’m starting to think that "oddities" are the new normal. Ice has now given was to temperatures 30 degrees above normal, though that won’t last past noon today.

This morning’s warm weather has brought with it the year’s very first spring arrival. The fog is so dense right now I can see little up on the mountain, so today’s new arrival was heard only. The killdeer have arrived again! I heard several of them, at least 2-3. Obviously, they can’t have been far away if one morning’s warmth is enough for them to appear on the mountain. So perhaps calling them a "spring" arrival isn’t entirely accurate. They likely spend the winter hanging out along a nearby river, and today’s warmth and mud was enough for them to show up and see if their beloved stoned parking lots are still here. Last year my first record of them in the new year was on February 27.

Because of the morning’s high temperatures, in a way, I can also say I have a second new arrival--mud. Mud is everywhere right now. A layer of mud even coats the top of the rapidly retreating ice, making many areas very, very slippery. Tonight, the temperatures are to drop back to a more typical range for February, and if the muddy icy isn’t gone by then, it will be every slipperier than it is now. Dog and Baby Dog skid and slide on the muddy ice, and both normally have better traction than I do. I’m wearing "tire chains" on my boots and can get around fairly well. I much prefer snow to either mud or ice, though in the scheme of things, I think I prefer mud just a little bit to the ice.

I had to take this morning’s photo down off the mountain this morning, as up where I live it was too foggy for a photo. Sometimes foggy looks mysterious or arty, but sometimes fog is too dense for that. This morning was one of those times.

Sunny Day

My snow is melting fast. I would not be surprised to discover it gone when I get home from work today. The forecast is calling for 60 degrees, and even when the daytime high only reaches the mid-40's the amount of melting from morning to evening verges on the shocking.

The snow is rapidly being replaced with mud, an unhappy result as far as I'm concerned. I happily wander through a snow-covered forest, but once I start losing shoes and ruining boots in the mud, I refuse to enter until the ground beneath me is solid again. So for me, mud season is the one where I am least active and least in the woods. I'll be happier when I'm not sinking.

I'm still adjusting to this earlier daylight savings time. I just can't equate snow on the ground with stays-light-until-7:30 p.m. I can't say I dislike it, but I just can't get past the weirdness of it. Maybe next year.