SPRING HAS SPRUNG
The lengthening days are full of activity outdoors. The natural world is bustling with wild creatures with no time to waste. Territory has to be secured, a mate has to be found and protected, offspring must be raised, and above all, food must be found.
The Canada geese were first off the mark, nesting before the snow had all melted. One pair, incubating in an exposed position, lost their eggs to predators and had to begin again in a better location. Another pair nested out of sight and are now proud parents escorting three goslings.
If the number of male ducks on the pond is anything to go by, there must be at least six female wood ducks and two female mallards sitting on eggs somewhere upstream. We’re bracing ourselves for a duck population explosion. Meanwhile, the unemployed males are paddling around together and occasionally waddling across the lawn to look for corn.
Male red-winged blackbirds arrived early in spring to stake out nesting sites, and had to endure some terribly cold weather. The females sensibly waited for the weather to improve before arriving, but they are here now, and paired-off. The reed-beds where they nest are full of their chatter.
The turkey flock is off in the woods doing who-knows-what, but a couple of loners visit us morning and evening to peck up any corn or sunflower seeds that might be lying around. There shouldn’t be any left after the geese, ducks, grackles, crows, deer, raccoons, squirrels, and chipmunks have eaten, but against all odds the turkeys always find some.
Now that bushes are starting to leaf out, and plants are growing, we probably won’t see deer so often. A group of around seven deer –females and yearlings – have been regular dawn and dusk visitors to the bird table all winter. One with a distinctive white mark on her forehead has been our guest for at least four years.
Sometimes we wonder if we are supplying too much food. The number of squirrels seems to increase daily. At the last count there were fourteen, reds and greys (variously colored silver, brown, and black), running around between the feeders. They are never still, and the flirting motion of their tails draws the eye.
Hungry mother raccoons are now foraging at all hours of the day, trundling around with that characteristic rolling of the hips, nose to the ground. There may be kits in the barn. We are keeping an ear out for raccoon kit noises.
Other people have barn cats. We have a barn rabbit. The floor of the barn is deep sawdust - perfect for a shallow scrape - and there are numerous boxes and pieces of rusting equipment to hide under, plus holes at the base of the wall-boards allow escape in any direction. “Our” rabbit emerges from the barn morning and evening, inspects the garden, takes a nibble here and there, has a run, chases any intruder rabbits, and eventually disappears into the barn again.
Our pond and stream have been beaverless for several years since the beaver family that used to lodge here ran out of small trees to cut down and moved away. All the remaining trees are too large for a beaver to fell, but the ice storm at Easter brought down a huge number of branches, many of which ended up in the water. For several days, a lone beaver has been swimming around the pond looking for fresh branches to gnaw. He (or she) decided to use an old wooden dock that shelves into the water as a dinner table, and sat there for a while daintily stripping bark from branches pulled from the water.
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