Hawthorn fruits are nobody’s favorite, but they stay on the tree and are valuable emergency food / With body temperatures now near 40 degrees, woodchucks awaken in their burrows every few days, raise their temperatures to over 94 degrees and urinate / Beginning of the nesting season for great horned owls, our earliest nesters / The viburnums, such as nannyberry and hobblebush, have naked buds, with no bud scales. You can see their miniature leaves all winter

Tan galls that stay on oak trees all winter and look like ping pong balls are called oak apple galls and are made by a wasp / Most mammals sit tight during a snowstorm, tucked in their dens. Wait two days and the woods will be full of their tracks / Look for common golden-eyes and common mergansers on ice-free sections of large rivers / Brown creepers typically fly to the base of a tree and then walk up it in a spiral pattern, picking off insects as they go

Sugar maple sap is rising; watch for red squirrels chewing on branch tips to lap up sap / Acrobatic aerial courtship displays by ravens are under way. Rolling, tumbling, and soaring are accompanied by the loud territorial call, a resonating “quork” / Meadow voles breed almost year round. Fortunately, they are eaten year-round, too, and are now a major food of hawks and owls / Coyotes are sexually active.  Five to nine pups will be born from mid-April to May

Blind, hairless gray squirrels are born.  In good food years, another litter will be born in July / Buttonbush seed heads often stay intact all winter.  Spring floods will carry the floating seeds to new shores / On warm days look for stoneflies perched on rocks near clean rivers and streams. They will mate, and the female will lay eggs back in the water / The mournful coo of the mourning dove has been mercifully absent all winter; you will hear it soon