Here are some more observations….spring is upon us!
March 25, 2007 (Sunday) Signs of Spring
Two nights ago Deborah and I heard the first spring peepers of the season. These small, seasonal frogs set up evening choruses of calls as part of their mating behaviors.
The male peepers call out sometimes in unison and sometimes in echoing contests against each other as they try to impress and attract receptive females. Their nightly singing will go on through June as long as their ponds and wetlands maintain adequate water levels. We heard this first group of peepers around 9 pm out in Spring Church in southern Armstrong County. The day had been cool and rainy and there was still a fine mist in the air and a cool dampness to the night. The chorus, though, of the peepers was brilliant! It rolled, and throbbed, and echoed around in the darkness. It was a major statement of spring.
Today, out on the Rock Furnace Trail of the Roaring Run Watershed Association, we went for a late morning walk, and the typically nocturnal peepers were out in force even though it was daytime! Maybe they were just energetically responding to the onset of the season or maybe just to the murkiness of the still foggy morning? They were chorusing down in the wetlands around the trail head’s parking area just off Brownstown Road. As we entered the trail, the sound of the high water roaring through the rocky stream beds quickly drowned out the peepers’ songs, but they were still singing under a bright, sunny sky when we returned to the car about a hour and a half later.
Very little is blooming on the trails. At a gas well about a quarter of mile in, though, there is a high, crumbling, rocky hillside that opens its concave face to the southern sky. The brown and gray rocks of the hill act like solar collectors and even two weeks ago the first Colt’s Foots (or should it be Colt’s Feet?)(see picture below) were starting to bloom here around melting patches of snow. Today, as the fog burned away, the incoming blasts of sunlight heated this hillside into heat shimmers and highlighted the now dozens of blooming colt’s foots into a glowing, neon yellow covering over the dull drabness of the rocky soil.
We walked down to the stream crossing but did not take the rock by rock hop across to the other section of the Roaring Run Trail. The water was quite high and covered all of the stepping stones. It was still too cold to think about wading barefoot across the stream or to even contemplate the effect of a foot slip on the wet, silt covered rocks. We chose the path of dryness!
On our way back up the hill toward the parking area, though, we noticed the white flowers of Spring Beauty on the north side of the trail. These flowers, as far as we knew, were not blooming a half an hour before when we had passed this trail section on our way in. The sunlight and the rising temperature must have just hit the right levels to let the flowers open. The tiny (about the size of the tip of my little finger) five petal, white flowers of spring beauty are streaked with lines of red or pink. As we adjusted our eyes to the scale of the plants, we noticed swarms of tiny flies hovering in and around these flowers, attracted to their harsh scent chemicals. Many early spring flowers smell like animal sweat or even carrion (or worse!…and you’ll have to use your imagination here!) in order to attract just the right set of flies to their flowers. The flies transfer pollen and, in turn, pick up their tiny “reward” drops of nectar in “payment.”
There were several, small, vernal (“spring”) pools along the sides of the trail but no toad or salamander eggs yet. The alterations of this trail over the past two years has greatly improved both the trail surface and also the drainage around the path, but these improvement for foot traffic have caused significant damage to the large number of formerly quite long lasting and very predictable, amphibian “nursery pools” that had been an important feature of this site. The toads, frogs, and salamanders that had used these pools will either have to rely on the shallower, less stable drainage flows along the side of the trail, or seek out different pools deeper in the woods. For the sake of our dwindling amphibian numbers, I hope that they find some adequate substitutes. There is a series of deep, seasonally permanent woodland pools up on the hillside trail that goes up and over the ridge that follows the Kiski River. We plan to make this longer hike very soon in order to check on these pools and all of their amphibian inhabitants.
An eastern wood peewee (the only bird that we saw today!) followed us back along the trail from the stream. It flew ahead of us for quite awhile singing its characteristic, scratchy “pee-wee” call high up in the poplar and oak trees that tower over the trail. It perched and flipped its tail as it sang (a behavior very characteristic of the peewee), and then flew back behind us singing furiously as if to keep us moving along. This peewee was the first flycatcher I have seen so far this spring and is probably a very recent migratory arrival. Some of those little flies that we saw pollinating the spring beauties are probably making up the peewee’s most recent meals! This particular bird is probably a male who is staking out and claiming a territory via his movements and songs in anticipation of the later arrival of the females.
It is, indeed, the start of Spring!
More soon,
Bill