and suddenly Summer

The trilliums seem to be holding their own against the garlic mustard. There are seven trilliums flowering in the patch rescued back in 2010. The hot and dry weather over the past week has compressed spring. The trees are leafing out already. The crabapples are blooming as are the wild plum back in the corner and the serviceberry. In addition to the trilliums and garlic mustard pictured above, there are dandelions, yellow rocket, forget-me-nots, violets and wild strawberry blooming.

Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (Coccinella septempunctata)

Last year I don't think I saw one of these traditional looking lady bugs; this is the second one I spotted this year. Last year about this time I saw loads of the twelve-spotted lady bugs that aren't so hemispherical and are a paler shade of red. I haven't seen any of those yet this year.

A troop of scouts have planted a bunch of pine seedlings in the 2011 area. The place needed it as many of the evergreen trees had not survived the past two summers of drought. I'm not sure how well the new trees will do. The scouts seem to have just sliced the sod with a spade and then dropped the seedling into the groove without much thought of trying to match the soil depth or using loose soil to pack in the root ball and avoid air pockets.

Crocuses and garlic mustard

Spring has arrived and in three weeks it has gone from snow to shorts weather. Someone planted a few crocuses along the fence by Newhaven. They popped up within a week of the last snowfall.

Crocuses are foreigners but they aren't exactly invasive. Not invasive like the garlic mustard below. That stuff carpets parts of the 1995 forest. The Fletcher Wildlife Garden blog has a good article about this invasive plant. You can't really do much about it unless you're willing to commit yourself long term to the eradication. I'm not so inclined, the more I learn about the environment the more I realize that almost everything I see around me is a newcomer. The garlic mustard is going to elbow its way in just as the dandelion, the plantain, the wild parsnip, the buckthorn, the honeysuckle and the wild carrot did before it. Even the rabbits and cardinals are newcomers to this area. Hopefully the garlic mustard will reach a balance and leave room for the other spring ephemerals.

This evening it was warm and pleasant when I went out at dusk to the berm area. I saw bats flying overhead catching insects on the wing. Every year I go out at dusk on a warm spring evening to see the bats. They move so quickly in the gloom just above the tree tops of the newly planted trees, it gives a bit of a thrill to spot them. They, at least, are one native that appreciate the naturalization area we planted. Then I stood still just inside the edge of the 1995 forest. Earthworms were all about, rustling the leaves from previous years. Everything is springing back to life and while this roadside patch of ground might be filled with foreigners and invasives like crocuses and garlic mustard, it is still exciting after a long winter to feel the pulse of life quicken around you.

Snow Mold

This snow mold seems to be actually growing from the snow. Or perhaps, as is more likely, the mycelium was growing in the melt water between the ice crystals and as the snow melted away it draped the web of mycelium fibers on top of the grass. In the spring time great mats of the stuff are revealed on the grass as the snow melts away. The threads are even more delicate than a spider's web and only remain visible for a day or two after the snow melts away.

Snow mold is a fungus that feeds on grass in cold wet weather. It doesn't necessarily need snow and is a problem for golf courses and other turf grower even where it does not normally snow. There are several different types of snow mold; the two most common being the grey snow mold and the pink snow mold. I believe the above image is of the grey snow mold as the reddish-brown sclerotia are visible embedded in the grass leaves. In the image below you can more clearly see one of the sclerotia after the thatch has dried a bit and the mycelium has disappeared. The sclerotia is the dormant form of the fungus that stays in the thatch through the hot and dry weather of the summer. The fungus starts growing again in the fall when the necessary cool and wet conditions are present.

The pinkish hue on the lower portion of the grass leaf in the above picture is a bit of a mystery. There are patches of this faint pink on the dead thatch all over the grass. I thought it might be from the spores of pink snow mold but I am no longer sure. I couldn't find any good close-ups of what pink snow mold is supposed to look like. All the pictures I found on the web were only useful for identifying the circular patches of dead grass it creates in lawns and golf courses.

Late Spring Snow

It felt quite spring-like last Sunday when I visited the south side of the berm; the ground had thawed; the tiny wolf spiders were scurrying through the long grass, and the buds on the silver maples were swelling. But yesterday, winter had one last encore.

Robins are back

Yesterday was a fine warm day where the temperature got above 10 degrees. The snow is rapidly melting and the robins have finally returned. The day before yesterday I saw my first robin on the berm.

This is an exciting time of year when each day one or two new insect species make their first appearance after the long winter. Yesterday the flies like the one below were out in force.

Cluster Fly (Genus Pollenia)

Cluster flies overwinter as adults and are the most common fly around in early spring according to one commenter in the bugguide. Their larvae are parasites of earth worms.

Signs of Spring

I saw my first insect yesterday, some sort of flying insect, a midge perhaps. The temperature was hovering around zero and the ground is still snow covered yet the insects are stirring. The birds know spring is around the corner too. I saw my first red-wing blackbirds on the 12th staking out claims in the bushes across the road. I haven't seen a robin yet, perhaps the snow is still too deep. It will take quite some time to melt the snow pack this year. A couple of weeks ago on the 12th when the last warm spell attempted to make a dent in the snow banks, it formed a large puddle over the bike path.

The abrupt end of one meadow vole.

More snow today. We have had quite a lot of snow this winter which makes a change from the last two winters. One unfortunate side effect of deep snow is that the white plastic spirals that protect the trees from the meadow voles aren't as effective. In the below photo you can see a meadow vole has almost completely girdled a maple tree just above where the plastic spiral stopped. A warm spell in January had given a hard crust to the snow, then a later snowfall gave the voles something to tunnel through at this new surface. This photograph was taken at the end of January when another warm spell revealed their pathways. Some of them were only market out by the dirt from their feces. In the photo below the dark specks of dirt on the snow around the trunk are feces from the meadow vole.

Not too far from this tree I spotted tracks that told a very clear story in my mind. In the first photo below you can see the tracks of a meadow vole as it was hopping over a fresh sprinkling of snow past a few grass stalks poking out of the snow. Suddenly its tracks stop at a place where there are a whole mess of confusing tracks. Looking more carefully in the second photo below there are a few specks of bright red. Somebody caught the poor guy and whoever caught it must have flown there. You can see what are clearly the mark of the bird's broad tail and the marks of its feet. About 10 feet from this spot in the third photograph are the marks of a large bird's tail as it brushed the snow. The story that comes to me is of a meadow vole scampering along in the dark over the fresh fallen snow when an owl perched 50m away in the bushes spots it. It launches itself and glides in low over the snow. It caught the vole before the little guy even knew it was there and dispatched him on the spot before taking off to feed at a more secure location. I would bet the bird was an owl as a vole is quite unlikely to be out in the open like that except at night, the most likely candidate being a Barred Owl as I know they are about because I saw one this winter in the Stoney Swamp.

As a bonus, here is a Youtube video of a meadow vole behaving quite strangely in broad daylight. This isn't my video but I saw a meadow vole behave like this several years ago on the berm. It just rested in broad daylight on top of the snow as I passed quite close by on my skis. I didn't have my camera with me that day or else I would have had plenty of opportunity to get a good closeup of the fellow.