Photo by D. Sillman
The branches of the silver maple at the bottom of my field are covered with flowers (photo to the left). Last week’s warm weather stimulated the opening of the flower buds a good two weeks before “normal.” If the early spring holds on, the leaf buds will be opening soon, too. This tree is always the first one to flower up on our hill. It is definitely an important sign of spring!
There are also four, large red maples close to my house (photo below). They typically flower a week or two after the silver maple. A cold, lingering winter (like the one in 2015) can push this flowering to early April, but usually by mid-March the little, red flowers open up first on the tree nearest the street (I think that it’s warmer there) and then on the trees clustered more toward the middle of my field. When the red maples bloom the honey bees begin to swarm and local beekeepers start to see red maple pollen in the honey in their hives
Tree buds are structures that encase and protect the forming flowers and leaves. The outer part of the bud is made of tough scales that form overlapping, shingle-like structures around the delicate leaf or flower growth tip. These bud scales keep out destructive insects and also insulate the inner tissues. These scales are, really, very tiny, very tough, highly modified leaves. Buds are classified as to whether they encase flowers (“floral” buds), or leaves (“vegetative” or, simply, “leaf” buds), or both floral and leaf embryonic tissues (“mixed” buds), and by their position on a branch (“terminal” buds are found at the end of a twig and “lateral” buds are found along the sides).
Photo by D. Sillman
On silver and red maple trees most buds are either floral or vegetative. The floral buds are larger and spherical and the leaf buds are smaller and more oblong. The floral buds are also typically clustered together in bunches on the twig. Over the winter I have watched squirrels nipping off the lateral buds on the red maple branches (they must be a welcome dietary supplement to balance out all of the sunflowers seeds they had been eating from my bird feeders!). Most of the branches, though, were too thin for them to get out to the terminal buds, so I expect to see both flowers and leaves concentrated at the ends of tree branches this spring and summer.
As I said, the floral buds on the silver maple just opened and soon, if this warm weather holds, the red maple buds will open revealing the delicate clusters of red and yellow flowers. The tiny pollen grains from these flowers will then be spread mostly by the wind (although honey bees, as I mentioned before, will be visiting some of these flowers). By chance some of the wind-blown pollen will encounter ova in the ovaries of other flowers and accomplish the fertilization phase of the reproductive life cycle. The pollen is produced in prodigious amounts by these trees, and you can easily understand why. The probability of a given pollen grain, randomly dispersed through the atmosphere by the wind finding an appropriate ovum is infinitesimally small! To insure that fertilization occurs at all, the trees must fill the air with pollen. Human interactions with this pollen mass can generate allergic reactions in sensitized individuals. Hardwood tree pollen, in general, is a major spring allergy trigger. Dripping noses and red eyes, unfortunately, come with the season.
Photo by Dcrjsr, Wikimedia Commons
Once an ovum is fertilized it will develop into the maple tree’s distinctive winged seeds (their “samara”). These “maple keys” will, by early May or so, form great, fluttering clouds as they drop from the trees and become scattered by the wind across lawns and woodlots. A large red maple tree can produce over a million of these seeds each year! Some of these seeds will germinate immediately while others may lay dormant in the soil until the following year. Many of these seeds will be eaten by birds and squirrels. These seeds and their seedlings are topics for a summer essay (and (great news!) summer is not that far away!)
Out in my front yard bird feeders at night there have been some regular visitors throughout the winter. The deer, of course, come in numbers to clean out any corn that hasn’t been eaten by the crows or jays or gray squirrels. They also like to use their noses to tip up the sunflower feeders to get a big mouthful of those (very expensive!) seeds! A possum has been a regular all winter. He digs around in the spilled seed beneath the feeders and always seem confused and frozen in place if I turn the yard light on.
Since January, I have been smelling skunks when I take Izzy out for her morning walk. I haven’t seen a skunk in quite a while, though. They must be coming in very late at night. Two nights ago I saw someone whom I hadn’t seen for months: a raccoon! They are regulars in the summer, but either this raccoon got very hungry hanging out in his hollow tree or the warm night made him think that spring was upon us. Raccoons don’t hibernate, but they do power down in cold weather and sleep in their tree or ground dens slowly metabolizing their stored fat reserves. This one had found some leftover corn which he continued to confidently eat even after I opened the porch door, shone my flashlight on him and said “hello.”
Photo by N. Townsend, Flickr
There have been more bird songs in the mornings and through the afternoons. Cardinals are singing their territories, and titmice are whistling for mates. Mourning doves begin calling well before dawn, and chickadees are joining in. White throated sparrows are still singing as are the Carolina wrens (they have been going on all winter).
Pileated woodpeckers have been pounding away on the spindly black locust tree out in the back of my yard. I also heard one down on Roaring Run last weekend banging away on one of the tall sycamores on the hill side of the trail. So many other bird species benefit from these tree holes! As someone said, if you want bluebirds (and tree swallows, and nuthatches and chickadees) leave some old trees for woodpeckers to work on!
I haven’t seen any snakes yet this year or chipmunks for that matter. Both of these animals are true hibernators and this transient warm spell probably won’t overcome their evolutionary perspective on our variable, late winter weather. Soon, though, very soon!