Warm Days Cool Nights - Spring Butterflies

Yesterday I worked on the tree tutorial loop starting at the NE Gate. Pleasant mild day. I saw two big orange fritillaries chasing each other around a big pecan tree and two individual morning cloak butterflies flying through the Woods; a big green-eyed cranefly at the same pecan. Sadly found a dead young snapping turtle at Island Crossing - recently deceased, no reason evident. Three big live leaches still attached together on its underside. In the afternoon, Ron and Bruce helped me confirm many of the trees on the tutorial loop including the fern at the junction with the Pipeline Trail - ebony spleenwort, Asplenium platyneuron. Ron corrected my identification of chickasaw plum and I accept that it probably is hawthorn Crataegus. Published records of the part of the Woods flora include Crataegus viridis. Many of the elms along the loop have opened yellowish brown flowers, particularly the taller trees with the higher branches more exposed to the warming sun. At home 80% of the lilac leaf buds have begun to open and show new green leaves emerging and the first two daffodils are blooming.

Quick check on Spring

10 AM morning visit to the Woods through the SW Gate. This past fortnight we've had abruptly some of the coldest weather of the winter (hi teens, low twenties) then some warming and a few inches of good snow (equal to 0.25 inch water) followed by rapid warming and a 0.1 inch rain. The combination of cold, to prime development, and warmth and water may start spring moving faster.
In the northern third of the Ragweed Delta, bittercress Cardamine was beginning to show its first clusters of small white flowers. The new leaves are edible in spring and I enjoyed a small green snack. On the south end of the Dune Trail, I encountered 3 whitetail - 2 yearlings and one older(?) .. they ran east along the south Boundary and then north on the white trail.
The ponds were full and stable.. East @ 2.75 feet; West @ 2.17 feet. There was water flowing at the Elm Bridge. I should set up a depth gauge above the Elm Bridge along the fence across the stream.
I measured the SW section trails: the Two Friends to Leaning Elm trail (2 posts plus ~ 120 feet to the Elm); and the W Dune trail two posts and a 100 feet to the S Boundary Trail.} One post for the 2 Friends - S Boundary Cutoff. Yellow flags currently mark all measured locations for posts.
I returned to the SW Gate via a route running along Chautauqua I had not established previously.. too often wet underfoot.. blocked with fallen trees and near significant Poison ivy. All that notwithstanding, I think I will go ahead and establish the route, cut the few fallen logs and trim out the near poison ivy. The route connects the northwest to the southwest in a way that no other trail provides. It will be a good route dry Sunday mornings absent the Chautauqua traffic. Found a broken newish shovel (used spring 2010 for setting the herp traps?).

Ice at Elm Bridge

Chilly day today, 23F with a north wind 14 m.p.h. I went to the NE entrance to the Woods at 10. I was curious about the Woods in the cold, after our gentle 0.25 inch rain Thursday 9 Feb. The East Pond was up to 2.71 and West Pond was up to 2.17 - both looking moderately full.
Below the Elm Bridge, the shallow water had frozen in concentric fractal like shapes. A small wren was investigating.

I walked most of the northern trails and did not see deer or fresh tracks. There were older frozen tracks of a dog below the largest main culvert. There were abundant feeding flocks of robins busily flipping leaves over on the forest floor.. and several bright red male cardinals tagging along with the group. East of Hackberry Alley there was a flicker calling and then hammering a tree and a hawk complaining.
I placed two more steel stakes (Barney Jct. Trl.and south Hackberry). I need to find two more for north Hackberry.
I checked species ID on 5-10 more trees from #160 to #200 off trail northwest of the Pipeline Trail.

Except for the birds, it felt like the Woods were locked down tight.. everyone safe in their beds before the approach of the coldest two days and nights of the winter.

I began the day early at the Woods and wound it up at sunset there too. I placed about 35 more of the short steel 50 m trail posts. Now only about five still remain. Then I can start to tag the posts with sequential location information. Seventy plus 50 m segments are marked now, 3.5 km.
The morning at 7:30 was cold (38F) and windy. From the NW entrance I encountered three deer near the big cottonwood with post.. doe and her two yearlings. She did not run fast or far. I think she may have become acclimated to people. Her two yearlings, are more flighty and go bounding away white tails flashing. There was a smell of skunk I must have startled by the West Pond - may belong to the burrows just up the hill. Dead possum on the trail pretty well decimated now.. fur on the trail.

Before sunset I returned to finish another segment and encountered seven or eight deer NE of the East Pond. Cottontail dashing in the eastern woods. Both morning and evening I watched flocks of robins foraging in the dried leaves on the forest floor. I thought how the new conditions of peri-urban ecology would affect the life and experience of an individual robin. Bugs and beetles are there as they have been for centuries..but now in winter, invasive green plants Lonicera honeysuckle and Ligustrum privet provide a different foraging environment. Individuals still experience the prior ecological relationships; but now have layered on top of that, new ecological effects, changed vegetation phenology/ species; flooding from run-off, the din of traffic on busy Highway 9 closeby.

Soft Soil, Steel Posts, Chilly Day

After Thursday night's 0.2 inch rain, the Main SW Trail had drained clear. It looked as if water had washed up to the lodged leaning ash. I set nine new 22 inch steel stakes at 50 m intervals from the SW Gate to 85 ft. west of the Dam; and seven along the South Boundary Trail to just beyond the G10 post; and one more on the Dune Trail just south of the dune crest.

I rolled up the vinyl rolls for the three eastern-most herp arrays and stored them with the minnow traps on top of the closed buckets.. ready to be deployed.

Three or four white-tailed deer were south of the East Pond. The water level of the East Pond was 2.7 ft and the West Pond was 2.22 ft. Fresh dog tracks along the main SW trail.

Water at Elm Bridge covered the top of the steel stake there; and was flowing gently.

I walked a game trail from the Ponds Entrance through the willows and sedge along Chautauqua.

Cold 45F and windy 18 mph NW day.