New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

The rain has been steadily pelting my home office roof a while now. I daydreamed and gazed out a window for quite a while. Daydreaming and gazing seems to be the perfect occupation this rainy Monday morning. In the grips of this pandemic and self distancing it seems like tossing your mind a distance away  fits right in. 

 

I spent some time with a robin bouncing around the northeast side of my lawn. He was pulling one worm after another right out of the ground before my very eyes. How I wished I had his skills when wanting to fill a can of worms to go fishing. Though I did learn years and years ago that a red light upon my head on a rainy night gave me his equal skills by day. 

 

The robin spent some time along the batches of daffodils at lawns edge. They sprang out of the ground weeks ago now. But until today have failed to produce a single blossom. I do see one yellow star over there now. How this pandemic seems to have all of our lives on hold like the daffodils. But they will eventually bloom with great luster like our lives will again too. 

 

They morning air continues to fill with bird songs as I go out to get my newspaper. And by night now the spring peepers own the night air near most any wetland. Have you ever tried to catch a peeper where you can plainly hear dozens calling? Its nearly an impossible task. I remember years ago floating the Lamprey River in New Market with two young college students who were working at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. We were stocking Atlantic Salmon fry by canoe. As we rounded a bend in the river that afternoon we could hear a chorus of peepers nearby. It was time to at least stand up and stretch our legs so we pulled up for a listen. I did them a one up. I promised either one of them a ten dollar bill if they would get go over to the wetland and catch a peeper. They immediately took the challenge and headed off. Ten minutes later they came back. Frogless. And so it is for these ventriloquists that scatter their calls to phantom frogs never to be captured.

 

The local turkeys seem to be on the move. To somewhere else. Yes it is time for them too to scatter about the forests and fields to lay their eggs all over the landscape to make some hungry skunk need to cover some ground to find another nest. Kind of an Easter egg hunt in the wild with eggs scattered across the landscape. 

 

Pretty much all the trees and shrubs now have swelling buds. I'm thinking spring will be about on time this year with leafout here in Central New Hampshire around that first week to ten days of May. I sure need to start paying attention to my fiddleheads I planted along the edge of my lawn decades ago. How they can spring up, more like mushrooms overnight, and be too high to pick in just a couple of days. Yes, it sure is time to cast an eye out the window, even on a rainy Monday, and soak in all that can be siphoned from the view.