World under ice

[written yesterday]
That taste of spring has left me feeling anxious and confined. Especially on days like today when the trees are all swaying in the wind, sometimes gently, other times violently thrashing about. I readily admit to being overly cautious, but then windthrow is a major disturbance affecting our forests. Our local forest has many standing dead trees, beech trees rotting inside from beech bark disease, and wet areas where shallow-rooted trees occasionally fall over, root system and all. There's been several times we've found our driveway blocked by tree trunks of various sizes.

So I just feel better not being under several tons of wood doing the wave. Which is too bad, since otherwise a walk would be great. The sky is cloudy but the sun regularly shines through the haze. The temperature, while brisk, is pleasant enough as long as you work up some body heat.

This brings up the another issue - other than hauling firewood, there's not much work I can do outside yet. There's no use skiing on the melted clumps of snow remaining, which would be a great way to appreciate the last few weeks of winter. I'm ready for spring garden work, but the world outside seems stuck in between seasons. With the loss of snow cover, the ground has lost its insulating layer. It and all the small bodies of water around us are caught up in a freeze/thaw cycle that seesaws with the sunlight and temperature.



The snow loss has also exposed many bits of greenery hugging the ground, from moss and ferns to rosette leaves of perennial and biennial plants. Ready for action, they nevertheless can find themselves held in suspended animation by the ice.



It feels like we're all stuck waiting for next month, when at some point the ground will thaw and we can all start taking full advantage of the lengthening days. I will finally get to dig compost into my garden beds and actually plant seeds into the still cold ground - peas, spinach and radishes which can take the cold and frosts. I will also be on the lookout for the first flower of spring. Skunk cabbage flowers use their own metabolism to create a warm microclimate for themselves and their pollinators.


[the picture above is of a skunk cabbage leaf bud]

For such a short month, February can last so long.

Seeds of Summer

The aster flowers of late summer and fall have been replaced by seeds attached to fluff poised to catch the wind.


Pokeweed, though its size can make it seem more shrub-like than herb-like, is not a woody plant. The above ground greenery dies and dries out under the stress of fall frosts. The seeds in these berries may find a hospitable site to germinate and survive long enough to make new plants, but this individual plant will have many more chances to reproduce. Right now its thick taproot stores the energy needed to grow a new set of stalks and flowers for the coming summer.



These berry-like structures are reproductive parts of another plant which withers in the fall frosts, a trait reflected in its common name: sensitive fern. The hard fertile fronds of the sensitive fern are easy to see in wet areas during winter since they remain upright, often poking out of the snow. They hold not seeds but spores. Ferns, along with related horsetails and clubmosses, have an extra generation in their life cycle because the spores give rise to something called a gametophyte, which is physically different from our conception of what a fern should look like. It's almost as if our eggs and sperm went on to be beings separate from us before uniting their genes and making a new, genetically normal human being. But relying on the fate of wind-dispersed spores can be risky business, and like so many other native woodland plants, sensitive ferns hedge their bets by spending the winter as a rhizome ready to sprout again in spring.

February Thaw - part 2

Wednesday

A little while after a cloudy dawn I was dropped of at a little nearby town to wait for a ride to work. The melt has continued, leaving patches of snow on our lawn and bumpy sheets of ice to step on under our car. In town, the creek that runs through a gorge underneath the main road is engorged by melt and rain. The brown waters churn and swell against their banks.

Brush spills down the sides of the gorge. European starlings perch in the surrounding trees and power lines, creating an exotic soundtrack that seems vaguely tropical. House sparrows, another European import, dart among the bramble. Periodically pigeons parasail high above, soaring between buildings with their wings held in rigid Vs.

It's a North American scene older than I am, yet fairly recent in evolutionary time. A single native species joins the ruckus when a couple blue jays fly in. One finds a big bread crumb and perches to eat it. It's an opportunistic community, brought together by their ability to live among such a messy species as us humans. Right now we all feel captivated by the weather.

February Thaw - part 1

Tuesday

The ice at work is slowly melting. The pond is like a Mars landscape, fields of dirty yellow with red accents and everywhere pockmarked by old deer prints. Chickadees twitter back and forth across the paths, seemingly excited by the warmth.

A robin song draws me away from the water, and I find the singer sitting with another robin a little ways off from a flock. Maybe it was a male thinking about claiming territory, but robins can sing occasionally throughout the winter and both birds flew back toward the flock after a while. These bursts of song are just preludes to the main event when the forests will bustle with the serious business of mate-finding and territory defense. I'm not the only one who tastes spring in this temporary thaw.

These robins have been flocking for at least a week in this area of young trees and exotic shrubs. The branches of alien buckthorn here are still laden with wrinkled black berries which also sustain a different flocking bird, the cedar waxwing. I find myself in the midst of a huge congregation. Every movement I follow with my binoculars finds another cluster of waxwings adorning slowly moving branches. These are one of my favorite birds. Their bodies are silky brown and they wear velvet black masks. They bring splashes of color to the brown landscape - yellow tipping their tail and waxy red gracing the tips of their wings. (You can see a picture here. I don't have a good lens for taking bird pictures yet). The air hums with their buzzing calls, almost as if I'm standing under a transformer on a utility pole.

I watch some birds pluck berries from the buckthorn, while others rest on bare branches. The waxwings flock and eat mostly fruit all year long, but the flocks that will spend the summer in our area will be much smaller than this. This is another sneak preview to the big migration push in spring when so many more species will gather in flocks along their migration routes.

Winter waning

Living on mostly solar power, we have developed a plant's appreciation of the sun. Not just sunlight itself, but its duration and intensity. Now we're about a month and a half from the Solstice, when day length was the shortest and the apex of the sun's trajectory the lowest of the year. The earth has actually been moving farther away from the sun since early January, but the combination of the earth's orbit and tilt means that we are tipping back toward our star.

As I wrote this yesterday, the clouds veiled the sun high overhead, but the happy hum of power coursing through our solar powered system makes me wish I had more use for electricity. Other creatures are also enjoying the relatively warm day. The dogs are romping outside and mixed foraging flocks of chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and woodpeckers are making a raucous noise. Back on the other side of Solstice when temperatures were dropping, leaves were also in various stages of falling. In general, spring in the forest is sunnier than autumn.

Of course we're still in the middle of solar winter with a month and a half to go til the vernal equinox. Even last Sunday when temperatures dallied in the 50's and I unearthed a slowly moving spider, a layer of snow and ice hid the ground. Bulbs and rhizomes are waiting for the ground to unfreeze so they can shoot up and flourish before the leaves return and the canopy again obscures the power of the sun.