Winter wrens are early risers. Their high-spirited song is one of the longest and most complex bird songs known / Hairy woodpeckers, with a hearing range close to that of a human, detect sounds from 34 to 18,400 cycles/second. They hear both the faint scratchings of bark beetles and the resonant drumming of potential mates / Coltsfoot is one of the earliest wildflowers. Brought from Europe, it has found a niche here in wet gravel at the edges of roads

The bright-purple flowers of beaked hazelnut are so tiny that you need a hand lens to fully appreciate them / Mink are giving birth to three to six young, not far from water, perhaps under a tangle of roots along a stream or in an old muskrat lodge / On rainy nights, when the temperature is above 41°F, spring peepers migrate to their breeding pools. The males may stay for a month, but most females arrive, mate, lay eggs, and leave within a few days

April 22: Peak of Lyrid meteor shower, on a moonless night / Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are beginning to return from points south. They lap up sap from holes in trees that they have drilled in the past few days and will eat any insects the sap has attracted / Earliest ruffed grouse are laying eggs. Average clutch is about a dozen eggs but the number varies / This year’s litter of woodchucks is being born. The parents may already have been out nibbling grass

One of these days will be Flicker Day, the day when all the flickers seem to return at once / Moose hair is in raggedy patches, for they are molting their thick winter coats / Balsam shoot-boring sawflies, a little larger than blackflies, may be abundant in Christmas tree plantations at midday in the warmth of the sun / Wood frog egg masses have turned mossy green, and the eggs are hatching, a week to a month after being laid / Fox sparrows are passing through