March 7

Given the recent uptick in bird activity, I thought it best to inspect the bird boxes we placed in the periphery around the feeder yard. All told, we have two wren houses and a large traditionally shaped bird house that has been home to chick-a-dees the past several years.

This has become a spring ritual, to open each of the boxes and clean out the nesting material of last year’s occupants. Admittedly, I always feel a bit ashamed at doing this, because I suspect (and hope) that the soon-to-be arriving tenets will be one and the same from last year. I feel guilty in so easily removing the engineering concoctions of twigs, moss and grass knowing that the same birds will likely spend hours rebuilding.

The two wren boxes had typical wren nests –overly packed and notably large for such a small little bird. The chick-a-dee house gave me a start just as I began backing out the screws that held on the wooden base. The screws made a screeching sound on account of friction with the wood, and this caused the entire box to resonate with a high pitch as I turned the screw.

After a few moments of this, I paused because the box itself was making a deep vibrating sound within, and for the life of me I couldn’t explain it. The vibration stopped. I started on the screw again, and no sooner did the vibration begin in earnest.

At this point, a child-like fear took hold of me, as I began to invent all sorts of irrational bird-box demons which were waiting to attack the moment the floor dislodged. Curiosity eventually overruled, though I admit to jumping back quickly as the last retaining screw released its grip and the floor dropped to the ground.

Wouldn’t you know, in the midst of all the nesting material of grass and twigs and bits of dryer fluff – a queen bumblebee had made her overwinter nest. She drunkenly buzzed about just within the nest ball, awakened rudely from her hibernation.

March 6

Drive along the roadways, or walk the back woods and you will notice the willows starting to yellow. If the light is just right, they even seem to create their own glow. The red and swamp maples are also starting to color in the stems.

Down on route 122 out of town, in the low area that forms a wetland which connects directly to the small lake inside Moore State Park, the road passes over a large culvert that provides passage for the wetland. On either side, but particularly on the eastern portion, swamp maples predominate around the low land.

They are starting to awaken so noticeably now, as if someone has painted on the stems a bare reddish sheen.

March 5

I heard it for the first time this morning, down near the spillway on the far side of Asnebumskit Pond. Somewhere in the sere stand of Phragmites a red-winged blackbird sang its unmistakable “prrr deeee.” I could only stand still and smile, listening to this sure harbinger of the coming spring.

It must be an optimistic bird, for the pond is still frozen over, and the surrounding berm and woodland is yet covered with at least 6” of snow. Yet there it perched within, hidden inside the tall fronds grasping a single stalk, swaying gently in the morning breeze.

I stayed several minutes just to listen; the bird called and paused perhaps a dozen times, and I couldn’t help but wonder the purpose of its call. The females aren’t due to arrive for nearly a month, so my sense is that this bird might simply be proclaiming this territory to would-be male rivals.

March 4

The old maple up the road had little ice sickles dangling from a few places where small twigs and branches had broken away since last fall. This is a sure sign that maple sugaring will begin in earnest for those few who still hang the buckets from the maples.

It was cold enough this morning that the running sap, rising through root pressure upward to the branches, leaded out of these small break points in the maple and froze into miniature stalactites of attenuated sugar water.

Behaving just as the squirrels, I broke off a small sickle to lick it, and sure enough I could taste the faintest hint of sweetness.

Just west and south of Paxton in the Brookfields is a large maple sugaring farm. We went to tour there a couple of years ago, when the sap was in full pressure. What an operation, with hundreds of yards (miles?) of clear plastic tubing overhead, connecting all the tapped sugar maples to a central collecting vat. It was amazing to stand below one of the lines and watch the semi-clear liquid flowing toward the sugar house, a stream of sugar water interrupted occasionally with tiny bubbles in the tube.

The sugar house was a small barn that contained a large boiler vat of sorts, fed continually by a voracious wood fire burning beneath. Evidently, during the sugaring season, the fires burn night and day for a couple of weeks on end, boiling down the sap in the vats until the water component is sufficiently distilled to leave the concentrated syrup behind.

Like so many things, there was so much labor and time for such a small yet sweet reward.

March 3

I walked the field loop again this morning, despite the strong breeze with a wind chill to remind me that we may still have a long haul yet toward any definitive spring. As if to emphasize this point, a light coating of snow must have fallen last night giving the landscape a clean, winter-like appearance.

The footing was good around the perimeter of the field, and the snowfall revealed several tracks that must have been made at some point during the past 12 hours or so. Here was the spot where a rabbit had come across the stone wall that borders the north part of the field. Its indecision was written plainly on the snow, as it evidently stopped, circled several times, and retreated hastily to the stone wall.

Further down were field mice tracks, perfectly preserved in the snow dust as tiny impressions in a line, weaving ever so slightly across the field expanse. I followed them for roughly 100 yards, until an area where drifting had occurred had obliterated their path.

At the western stone wall deer tracks alongside what appeared to be a following dog, perhaps fresh on the scent and trailing the deer. The dog’s paw was large, and I wondered what stray was patrolling these fields in the pre-dawn hours.

More surprising was the tractor tread patterns that met me near the corner of the southwestern wall. Of course, I stopped to consider if it likely that either of the men had driven down this way so early. Were it the beginning of the summer, I wouldn’t need to question this, as the tractors are usually out each day in the hour just before dawn. Today, with it being 7 am and just after sunrise, there was no reason to account for the tractor this far down the field.

The tracks were fairly compressed, extending in a relatively straight line up the snow-hidden two track that leads from the barns. I followed them toward the barn, trying to figure out any rhyme or reason, and in the end had no conclusions to make. The tractor tracks were a mystery to me, just as so many of the small critter prints in the snow.

March 2

March is the unofficial beginning of frost heave season here in Paxton. Our own road has stared to buckle noticeably along a crack in the bed that runs down the middle, beginning just after the farm driveway and extending down intermittently to our front.

The town roads are littered with these temporal ridges and potholes, as the warming days and yet still cold nights expand and contract the moisture beneath. Our car rides like an old jalopy, bouncing along as if on leaf springs whose time has long passed.

This expansion of the soil is a powerful force, and we wonder at the way it shapes the landscape. The farm field is evidence of this enough, as the first crop of newly surfaced rocks should be ready within the month. Some are the size of an oak barrel, having moved ever so slowly year after year through freeze and thaw until it wormed its way to the surface ready for harvest.

Soon we will hear the tractors in the field, going slowly with bucket low to the ground so that one of the men can collect them. Another sign of spring.

One large boulder had made its way to the surface of the middle of the field used last year for cabbages. I suspect that when Fred was cultivating one of the tines caught alarmingly on the rock, which precipitated his using the tractor to fully extract it. There it sat for the remainder of the fall, propped upright in between the rows of plastic that marked the beds of cabbage.

I can look out the front window and see the rock through the spruce line. Though the field is sill roughly 8” deep in snow, the boulder sits nearly 2 feet up above the surface.

Yesterday, I took the dogs for a walk though the field, just in the early morning when the cold temperatures had hardened the snowpack enough so that we could walk on top without breaking through. The dogs were particularly interested in exploring around the boulder, for it is evident that our resident deer use the rock as a marker of sorts to locate the cast off cabbage that resides below the snowpack.

Leading up to the boulder from the far fields is a trail of deer tracks. They form a jumble around the rock, evidently where the deer had stopped to hoof at the snow in search of old cabbage, some of which has been now exposed to the air. The dogs obviously enjoy the odors, both of last year’s decomposing cabbage and of the remnant passing of the deer.

For our part, when the sun warms just enough, we are patently aware of the decomposition. Old cabbage may be intriguing to the dogs, but I assure you that being downwind from this patch has its disadvantages.

March 1

March

It is surely early spring when the great horned owls earnestly have their morning conversations. They must have awakened me at 3 am, and I lay in bed for an hour listening to them calling back and forth.

One must have been just next to the house, on the north side in the small copse of woods. On occasion we will spot an owl, either great horned or barred, perched in the mid boughs of the large white pine that dominates just there. The other sounded farther away, perhaps deep in the lower woods where the access road bends toward Asnebumskit Pond.

They had quite a periodic rhythm, with one calling a distinct “hoo, hoo,” followed by a pause of ten seconds or so. Then, the partner would repeat, followed by an interval of nearly a minute. This went on for over an hour, and I began to wonder why their conversation had reached such an impasse that they wouldn’t change the subject.

Great horned owls can be easily fooled into returning a call. I’ve gone outside at such an hour, stood on the porch and called “hoo, hoo” to the woods below. Often this time of year I will receive a reply. Once I even coaxed an owl to approach from the woods, calling then moving, calling then moving closer. It must have stopped at the woods edge at the lower part of the garden beyond the barn. It called once more and was gone.