A Look at the Season's Main Events
By Virginia Barlow
May
Bear cubs are now about five months old and weigh around 10 pounds / Spring beauty flowers are opening, a few days after hepaticas begin to bloom / Shiny, varnished-looking egg masses of eastern tent caterpillar, usually on the twigs of rose family members, begin to hatch / A wood thrush may sing as many as 20 different songs / Look for spider webs in flowering birches. Some spiders eat the nutritious birch pollen grains after snaring them in their sticky nets
Some apple trees are showing pink buds / Daddy longlegs begin hatching from eggs laid late last summer / Blooming: swamp saxifrage, Mayapple, Jack in the pulpit, pussytoes / The first of perhaps three litters of northern short-tailed shrews is being born. These tiny animals have a poisonous bite and prey on mice and voles / Spring azure butterflies, silvery violet blue above, flitting through the woods signal the return of warm weather / Bobolinks begin to sing
Two-year-old beavers have left home and are searching for new house sites / Young fishers are following their mothers through the woods / Blooming: nannyberry, highbush cranberry, clintonia, and starflower / Gray tree frogs begin calling in late afternoon and will continue to deafen anyone nearby until after midnight / Hatching of blackflies, for the 180 millionth time. They’ve been around since the mid-Jurassic / Painted trillium is blooming in conifer woods
Snowshoe hare have switched to a summer diet of clovers, grasses, ferns, and the young leaves of alders and birches / Filamentous bacteria called actinomycetes give soil the wonderful earthy smell that wafts up as you prepare the garden for planting / Grouse mothers make a variety of clicking and whining noises if they are disturbed with their chicks, now about four weeks old / Trembling and big-toothed aspen seeds are ripe and being carried by the wind
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These listing are from observations and reports in our home territory at about 1,000 feet in elevation in central Vermont and are approximate. Events may occur earlier or later, depending on you latitude, elevation - and the weather.
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© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
