green!

 

drama

 The swallows are back. Their soaring and powerful aerial acrobatics are uplifting, figuratively and literally.

 But they are late. They are late to the party here. Every year they covet the birdhouse in the back, but that spot was taken weeks ago by the bluebirds.

 

Every year the swallows protest the unfairness of it all. They start their mornings by dive bombing the nest for about an hour. They sit on the barbed wire fence and gaze longingly at the occupied birdhouse. I've even seen them sit atop said birdhouse while the female bluebird is inside sitting on her nest. In years past, the swallows have kept this up for a couple of weeks, but the bluebirds will not budge. Eventually the swallows give up and move on. This is what passes for drama here on the other side of the creek.

P.S. the photos above were not taken by me. I used them years ago on this blog. They probably came from flickr, but at this point I'm not sure whom to attribute them to.

spring ephemerals

 I've been drawn to wildflowers and astronomy in recent years. One reason is that if you know where and when to look for something, you can usually find it. The spring ephemeral season has started. Beautiful wildflowers bloom on woodland floors before the trees leaf out. It is a very short season. Finding some old friends in the usual places. It's a very short season.

Round Leaf Yellow Violet

on the way to the vernal pool

 

Trillium, on the Crossroads

Trout Lily, on the Crossroads

Bloodroot, on Rte. 133 near the town hall

 

poor man's fertilizer

 Old timers in Vermont call this "poor man's fertilizer." I wonder what Doug and Kim are calling this?

why?

 The spring season is something of an article of faith today with temperature of 35 degrees and rain; snowing in some areas. But the Village Snack Bar is open and Allyn has received a delivery of mulch from yours truly. Birds flocking to the forsythia bush in the back.

The forsythia season here is usually measured in days. This year we have had beautiful blossoms for weeks. I wonder why?

Season of birds

 Heard the sound of a house wren in the back. How could such a small bird make so much noise?

Lady in a Box:

Oh, Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grovers Corners?

Mr. Webb:

Well, ma'am, there aint much--not in the sense you mean. Come to think of it, there's some girls that play the piano at High School Commencement, but they aint happy about it. No ma'am there isn't much, but maybe this is the place to tell you that we've got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin' up over the mountains in the morning, and we all notice a good deal about the birds. We pay a lot of attention to them. And we watch the change of seasons; yes, everybody knows about them. But those other things--you're right ma'am--there aint  much-- Robinson Crusoe and the Bible; and Handel's "Largo," we all know about that; and Whistler's "Mother"-- those are about as far as we go.

Our Town

Thornton Wilder

Ira, Vermont

 

woodcocks

 A few days ago I got an email from a friend that lives at the Vermont Zen Center. She is also a reader of this blog. She had read about woodcocks and was all excited about them. The article she read mentioned some writing that Aldo Leopold had done about woodcocks in his masterpiece on wildness, A Sand County Almanac. She had seen where I had mentioned this work on this blog, and wondered if I knew anything about woodcocks.

wikipedia

 I am familiar with Leopold's piece and with woodcocks. They are an amazing bird. They have a mating dance every spring in the north country that is amazing to behold. I told my friend that I had actually seen woodcocks do their thing at the Center. She should look for them down by the bridge. I told her what to listen for, and how you can actually get very close to them if you move towards their location when they are performing the aerial part of their mating dance.

Aylie's email and enthusiasm about woodcock's reignited my own interest in seeing them again. I went out to the West Road around sunset and looked for them where I had seen them in years past. There are a couple of new houses in that area and I, and I was worried that the change in habitat had driven them away. That seems to happen so often these days. I walked around for awhile and didn't hear anything. I turned around and headed back to my car. Then I heard it, the peent, peent sound of a woodcock! At that point it was too dark for me to see them, but it was enough for me to know that they were still out there.

I drove home with the happy thought of recounting my adventure with an email to Aylie. When I got on the computer, there was an email from her. She said that they had seen one. She said that she was happy to report that they were still there down by the bridge in the spot that I had seen them years before.

I couldn't help but think of the first time I had seen a woodcock. Amazingly enough, it occurred at the very same Center in Shelburne when I had attended a Lovingkindness workshop with my friend Doug. We were heading for the car when all of a sudden he seemed to go crazy. "There's a woodcock!" he said. He showed me the stalking process that I mentioned here earlier. Doug is a retired state biologist. Actually, he helped to restore the wild turkey population to Vermont very early in his career. Later in his life he became well known within the area because of his work with rattlesnakes. He is normally a pretty soft spoken guy, but was a different person altogether during this episode, totally animated. It was pretty easy to see why he had become a biologist.

As is sometimes the case, I was filled with emotion as I read Aylie's email, but I was having difficulty naming it. I was grateful and the gratitude seemed to point in many directions. Grateful for Aylie, Doug, Aldo Leopold, and to live in a place where the miracles of the natural world can still be experienced; where they haven't disappeared completely. Just happy to be alive.

woodpeckers

 Spring is a busy time here on the other side of the creek. Bluebirds have been around on and off during the winter, but now they have started the annual nest building in the birdhouse in the back. Saw a flicker in the back yard the other day. I see them infrequently but regularly over the course of the summer.

This is an old photo I got online somewhere

Woodpeckers are very busy this time of year. A lot of their pecking activity right now is not for food, but establishing their territories. They find the loudest thing possible to bang on. Telephone poles are popular. There is a woodpecker on the Crossroad that likes to peck on the back end of a building that is falling apart. This tumble-down shack acts like a giant megaphone for him. There is an old cylindrical metal well about a hundred yards from our house. A few years ago there was a woodpecker that liked to peck on that. He really made a lot of noise.

balmy

 Temperatures near 70 over the weekend. It has been quite some time since we have had any significant rain. Fire warnings have been posted due to the low humidity and the dry conditions.

One of the important signs of spring for the true believers, in this case the Kahle/Mason clan, is the Masters golf championship which finished up yesterday. It take place at the same time every year, early in the month of April, and I have been following it all my life. I remember so many afternoons, watching the action from Augusta National, from my couch, looking outside, and seeing snow piled up as far as the eye could see. There wasn't much difference here on the other side of the creek between snow cover in April and January. While we still can have snow in April, just ask my son-in-law Andy, snow covered Aprils seemingly are a thing of the past. We haven't had snow on the ground for a month.

I spoke with Nathan Hewitt the other day. He taps the trees on our place as part of his maple sugaring operation. I asked him how he did this year. He said that they yielded about a third less than normal. He said they didn't have the proper mix of warm days and cold nights. It was either warm days and nights, or cold days and nights. I understand from botanists within the state that most shrubs and trees are stressed these days, and it is because there just isn't as much snow as there used to be. In the short term, it's wonderful to have such balmy conditions this time of year, but in the long term it's very troubling.

look and listen

 Temperature near 70 yesterday. Daffodils are blooming.

So is the forsythia.

During the Temple Night ceremony on Zoom last night, I heard the sound of a red-eyed vireo calling out in the twilight. It's been a long time since I've heard that sound. Even though it was starting to cool off, I opened the window...to listen.

plant people

 Back from visiting family in East Aurora. Coltsfoot appearing along the Crossroads. It is the first wildflower of the season; common, ubiquitous, miraculous.

Found a lovely lily (Calochortus albus) in a shady adenostoma thicket near Coulterville, in company with Adiantum Chilense. It is white with a faint purplish tinge inside at the base of the petals, a most impressive plant, pure as a snow crystal, one of the plant saints that all must love and be made so much the purer by it every time it is seen. It puts the roughest mountaineer on his good behavior. With this plant the whole world would seem rich though none other existed. It is not easy to keep on with the camp cloud while such plant people are standing preaching by the wayside.

Through the Foothills

My First Summer in the Sierra

John Muir