Marvelous spring days.
Out in Oliver’s Woods a dance of warm days alternating with cold fronts and spring rains have warmed and wet the soil to push up green shoots. Chickweed and its small white star flowers, false garlic, Japanese honeysuckle, euonymus, blue violets, spring grasses and dozens of other species. The forest floor is green.
Overhead, the forest canopy is changing. Slippery elm two weeks ago flushed out chartreuse samaras. Box elder is the first to open its leaves. Cottonwood bud scales, shiny and glistening, are falling to the ground as the big cottonwoods prepare to come alive. The community of forest trees is waking up.
Morels have been popping up, a delight for sharp-eyed mushroom hunters.
Flowering shrubs, the non-native Elaeagnus autumn olive, have opened cream yellow flowers. They profuse the air with a sweet smell and attract bright yellow tiger swallowtails. The warm sunshine on the forest floor also brings out to bask and feed, orange Anaea goatweed butterflies, orange and black Polygonia question mark butterflies, acrobatic orange skippers, and elegant red-spotted purple butterflies.
Also basking and feeding are big fierce-looking snapper turtles in east and northwest ponds along with red-eared sliders. One turtle adopts a peculiar posture, perched on a small floating log, body 80% above the water, in warm sunshine, and head and neck hanging down submerged in the pond waiting for passing prey.
The shell of a recently dead snapper was sitting in deeper water at Island Crossing, about twenty feet from where I saw a snapper sitting quietly underwater about ten years ago. I wonder if it may have been the same individual. I think so.
Joan showed me a bald eagle circling west of the NW entrance to the Woods. Quiet late morning walks are filled with calls of cardinals, buzz of wrens, startling cry of red-tailed hawk, taking flight from two pursuing crows. First skinks of the year scuttle quickly off the trail into the green new honeysuckle sprouts on a sunny slope above the NW Pond. Happily a yellow-crowned night heron has adopted the NW Pond and others join it.
The Woods are waking up.
