Edward Kanze Nature Log
With the arrival of May, spring has fallen over our part of the Adirondacks. Sometimes it brings wet heavy snow. This year we've enjoyed a string of almost hot days, followed by weeks of delicious sunny days neither hot nor cold but just right for the season. Blackflies are just beginning to nip, but the walking and paddling is still good, and the wildflowers — red trillium, trout lily, goldthread looking pretty near our house---are popping open by the day.
It's been a pretty good spring for birds. A Mother's Day bird walk at our house brought the sights and sounds of a Baltimore oriole, a black-backed woodpecker, gray jays, American crows, northern ravens, eastern kingbirds, eastern bluebirds, tree swallows, barn swallows, belted kingfishers, blue-headed vireos, chipping sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, solitary sandpipers, Canada geese, American goldfinches, purple finches, hermit thrushes, winter wrens, and a smattering of wood-warblers, including yellow-rumped, Blackburnian, Nashville, and magnolia.
The annual salamander run was somewhat disappointing this spring, with no major weather event to trigger a mass migration. But the amphibians trickled across our roads on humid and drizzly nights, and we managed to see a few spotted salamanders.
Trees have been flowering more or less on schedule. Quaking aspens and white birches are in bloom now, and red maples and American elms have already set seed. My favorite wildflowers of early spring, the tiny electric-pink female blossoms of the beaked hazelnut (a native shrub), have mostly withered now. Northern bush-honeysuckle is in bloom, and so are dandelions on most every lawn.
Along the Saranac River, the night sounds are chiefly those of spring peepers at the moment. Their peeps in aggregate remind me of sleigh bells, and right now it sounds as if a convention of Santa Clauses have gathered along the banks. Evenings, early mornings, and moonlit nights, American woodcocks make their nasal "peents" in the dusk and fly extravagant nuptial flights over the tall grass of what used to be our lawn.
It's a magnificent time of year here---everything being born anew, and the Arctic world we inhabit in winter rapidly giving way to the Amazonian jungle we revel in in summer.
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