LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
NORTHERN SPRING: AWAKENING
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
By early March the sun, higher in the sky and shining three hours longer
than it did on December 21st, makes short work of snow and ice storms that
persist into early spring. Each year no matter what sort of winter has
passed—continually stormy and gray, bitter cold and blasting, or
sporadically stormy and pleasant—I am more than ready to welcome the return
of life.
I walk out to admire the fattening buds. Winter cold, together with spring’s
warmth, start a bud’s journey into growth. The wild apple buds, golden green
with russet tints, are fattening. I take one with me. Indoors, under the 50x
magnification of my field microscope, the bud that I have sliced cleanly in
half with a craft knife glistens lusciously in its glucose-filled world
newly infused with rising sap. Tiny leaves covered with minute sticky
threadlike hairs resemble a silken weave unraveling. Spring’s strengthening
sunlight is inside the bud. I am looking at the entire growth package of an
apple tree fruit spur, the twig, leaves, blossoms, and the eventual fruit it
will put forth in the coming spring and summer. The sliced bud reveals the
flush of beginning life, a map of apple existence, the universe of an apple.
For, beyond the powers of magnification, the vital potential for next
season’s fruit spur is encapsulated somewhere in this glowing green mass.
Receding snowdrifts give off an odor of dog waste, an unpleasant phenomenon
of spring if children, rolling in snowy play, bring the stink indoors on
their soaked clothes. The smell is another signal that life is rising.
Bacteria, stirred by the flood of moisture, begin to work on the vegetation
from last year’s growth flattened all winter beneath the snow. The smell is
plant life rotting with bacterial action, another signal that life is
rising. A species of snow flea, tiny creatures that pepper the snow in
enormous numbers in late winter thaws, gather in footprints and large
indentations in the snow that create sunny microclimates warmer than the
surrounding air. They create an odor that is similar to cut-up raw turnip.
Over all, the air carries a more pleasant scent, a hard to define bouquet of
season’s passing —‘Chateau Au Revoir L’Hiver, 2003’—a vintage with
suggestions of mature seasoning overtopped by sweet freshness.
Insect activity, never entirely quiet in winter months, increases with each
warming day. Overwintering butterflies, the mourning cloak and the
tortoiseshells, surprise me with their appearance when the last snow banks
remain piled against stonewalls. The mourning cloak, with coloring of dead
leaves, seems to be a leaf remnant picked up on an early spring breeze, but
the Milbert’s tortoiseshell, with its bright orange bands on black upper
wings, startles me when I see it suddenly sail into view around the corner
of the house in late March.
The first crocuses by the house foundation are opening. Pussywillows show
white fuzz. The basal rosettes of bluets, violets, mullen, and daisies, free
of snow, appear greener as each day passes.
A red-winged blackbird announces his arrival at the pond. “Onk-a-ree,” his
song, scrapes across a cold spring wind. When I hear the red-wing’s call for
the first time, I wonder how such a grating voice can lift my spirit. I
recognize there is more to it than the almost musical trill of the final “ree”.
I sense the undeniable vitality in the red-wing’s song. This boy is here to
stake out territory. His potential harem will arrive in a few weeks, and he
must be prepared to attract as many females as his territory will support.
The red-wing announces spring, but a more subtle birdcall confirms spring
is here. The soft nasal sound of “peent”, repeating from the edge of the
woods and the meadow in a quiet March dusk, never fails to fill me with a
surge of joyful acknowledgement. The woodcock has returned.
I go out just after sunset, face westward toward the still bright evening
sky, and listen. The first detected “peent” alerts me to watch the
silhouetted tree tops for the moment when the woodcock falls silent and
takes flight to perform his ‘sky dance,’ so wonderfully described in Aldo
Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. The bird, a tiny and twirling
object, twittering overhead, moves in a whirl-a-gig sort of way. Then, with
a pulsing, bubbling, swooping sound, he lands close to where he began to
fly. Within seconds the “peenting” begins once more. The dancing flight may
repeat many times before darkness ends the performance for the evening.
As the last remnants of snow and ice melt away, I walk the margins of the
hay meadow that dry out quickly to look for the early bluet flowers. The
pussywillows are elongating into fuzzy yellow catkins, and the solitary bees
are busy gathering nectar and pollen. Streamside, the trillium and
jack-in-the-pulpit poke green shoots above the leaf litter. The vernal pool
is nearly ice-free.
On the first evening of rain when the temperature stays above fifty degrees, I
visit the vernal pool, a small bowl-like depression, a tiny oxbow left when
the stream made another channel nearby many years ago. In spring it fills
with snow melt and rain. By July it will be almost dry. This is where the
spotted salamanders will gather to mate on this wet night. I carry an
electric lantern and wear a headlamp. I sweep the grassy path with light for
signs of salamanders on the move toward the pool. Most of the year, these
salamanders remain sheltered in small burrows and under rotting logs
hundreds of feet from the pool. The mild temperatures and steady rain beckon
them out to the water on what is called “big night,” and I have sometimes
seen the glistening bodies of salamanders on their way to the pool.
Beside the pool, I shine the lantern beam along the leaf-covered bottom.
Raindrops dimple the water’s surface, and I cannot see as clearly as I wish.
The light reflects from the eyes of wood frogs, floating stretched out on
the water. A few are paired in amplexus, the mating hug of male atop
female’s back. When I switch off the light and stand silently, the “clucks”
of the frogs fill the night as they call invitingly to each other.
The rain lessens to a sprinkling mist. My light beam spotlights movement in
the leafy duff at the edge of the pool, and I see the yellow spots on the
black back of a large salamander. She glides purposefully out into the pool
and rests in the brown litter on the bottom. Soon I see two more salamanders
moving slowly in the pool’s depths. In time the salamanders begin to
‘congress,’ a term that describes the mating dance of spotted salamanders
where the animals intertwine and rub against each other. The movement is
more decorous than frenzied. This streamside pool is small and the
‘congress’ I witness has less than a dozen participants. As the amphibians
twist and turn, I cannot count precisely, but I stand quietly watching the
confirmation of spring’s presence in this renewal of life’s process.
Tomorrow I will return to the pool to check for the tiny white sperm
packets, spermataphores, that the male salamanders left on the bottom of the
pool. Some females drew them up into their cloacae to fertilize their eggs
in the mating congress last night. Others will gather spermataphores in the
next few days, and soon I will find globular egg masses, some four inches
and more across, attached to submerged branches and the leaves of last
year’s reed growth.
In the flight of woodcocks and the gathering of salamanders the remnants of
winter dissipate. The certainty of spring is affirmed, and I am vitalized.
Nature is thus ever new, yet at the same time unfailing, unchanging in
her essence.
—Elizabeth Bishop, North Haven
