4:00 p.m., 50F, sunny
The berm across the trail leading into Lyman Woods from the hospital bristles with wild onion shoots several inches tall, reaching near-full height. Interspersed among the onions are toothwort leaves with floral buds raised and ready to open. A dilapidated bloodroot beside the trail has lost two of its 8 leaves to the wind or the rain or someone walking by. The lost petals are nowhere to be seen. Further on, all along the trail, spring beauty is in flower, not fill-the-woods-with-flowers flowering, but enough to know that April is in full swing.
The charred soil sloping down to the pond at the south end of the woods smells like campfire. We’ve had a lot of rain and it is spongy and muddy. A chorus frog sings slowly and alone at the bottom of the hill. One flicker is squeaking repeatedly while others are moving up the tree trunks, darting between them, chattering at each other. Robins are hopping along the forest floor, gleaning insects from the leaves. Patches of prairie trillium emerge clawlike, a week or so behind the populations at Maple Grove, making me wonder if the burn set them back or if they are moving more slowly because this slope is shallowly north facing.
Two pairs of wood ducks are floating slowly across the pond, which is as full as I remember having seen it. A flycatcher–probably eastern phoebe, though it seems a bit small and doesn’t dip its tail as often as I expect for a phoebe–perches on a shrub about 100 feet away. It sallies out and grabs something, then swoops off between the trunks and out of view. Further down the trail, I notice at the edge of my vision a brown creeper moving up a trunk and turn my head just in time to watch it creep out of view. I walk around the tree but fail to find it. Phoebes are calling from the forest adjoining the backyards. White-breasted nuthatches are honking, golden-crowned kinglets are squeaking above me. Juncos are everywhere, picking at the leaves and flying low over the forest, cleaning up insects, chipping and buzzing, rattling, eager to leave town and make way for the warblers.
A chipmunk runs past. A minute later I find her crouched at the base of a white oak. She stretches high on her back feet to reach up the tree, for what reason I don’t know, like a cat scratching at a post. She drops to all fours and grabs something marble-size at her feet that she holds between her paws like a hamburger, fingertips just touching, and proceeds to devour in a drizzle of tiny bites. She jumps on top of a log and scratches vigorously at her armpit. She turns to look at me. Then she dives back to the base of the tree, where she bolts into a gap at the curled-bark margin of an old burn scar. I would not have even noticed there was space in there. I look closely but cannot see the chipmunk inside.
A fox sparrow is singing from the backyards. This is a song I did not know until today. It is a sequence of five bouncing whistles, then a burr. I record it and will listen to it several times as I am writing. It repeats its song roughly a dozen times. A small, drab, yellow-breasted bird whose species I do not recognize lands on the ground 50 feet away. I watch it until it is out of sight. A golden-crowned kinglet hops the length of a branch eight feet above the ground in the same area of the woods, then faces my direction and jumps off the branch as though he were jumping off the edge of a pool. A split second into his fall, just as his toes would have touched the surface of the water, he flicks his wings and flies diagonally down to the ground. He forages around before flying back into a tree.
The narrow-leaved wild leeks are coming out and seem, like the trillium, to be somewhat behind those of Maple Grove, but I believe for a different reason: these are narrow-leaved wild leeks, while the broad-leaved wild leeks dominate Maple Grove and come out faster and ultimately larger. The broad-leaved leeks, however, will only bloom in late June or July, several weeks after the leaves die back. The narrow-leaved leeks will bloom earlier, scapes visible before the leaves have fully died back. The narrow-leaved leeks are also on slightly drier soils. Different strategies for even closely-related species.
A pair of hermit thrushes kick at the leaves and pick their way across the forest floor, a little slenderer than robins. They seem to do more flying and less hopping than the robins. I watch one for a while through my binoculars. He stands still. I put my binoculars down and stare right at him, but he has disappeared. I raise the binoculars back to my eyes, and he’s there again. I do this a few times until, when I put them down, I can still see him, as distinct as a leaf blown against the base of the shrub.
It’s been about an hour. A titmouse is calling as I walk out and check myself for ticks. I look at Merlin, which has been running in my back pocket, and realize that somewhere along the way I missed a great blue heron calling, likely somewhere out over the marsh that cradles Lacey Creek on its slow crawl westward, out of the forest and toward the highway.