After the snow has melted, when the ground has just started to warm and the first hints of green have returned to the landscape, I keep an eye on the space beneath the old apple tree just beyond our vegetable garden. It is in this spot each spring that I find the first bloodroot, its large, singular leaf wrapped tightly at first around the white flower within, until it all – leaf and petals and bright yellow stamens – unfurls toward the warming sun. After that first plant emerges from the soil, more follow; a small blooming cluster expands into a rippling colony beneath the tree and down the field. These early spring flowers – like the trillium and trout lily that bloom in the nearby woods just a bit later – offer such welcome color at this time of year.
Seeking out that first sign of spring is a ritual I imagine many of you share, whether it’s spotting the pastel haze of red maple flowers on a distant hillside, noting the return of the white-throated sparrow’s Old Sam Peabody-Peabody- Peabody call, or feeling the damp of the earth beneath your feet as the frost gives way. While each season has its own character, spring feels – to me, anyway – the most like a bridge, carrying us from the cold and dark of winter through to the heat and full-blown exuberant life of summer.
That shift appears in the pages of this issue in various ways. Seepage forests (Knots & Bolts, page 20) are among the first areas to thaw, providing important food for wildlife. These areas are also hotspots for biodiversity – the importance of which Alexandra Kosiba covers in her Forest Insights column (page 74). Forests are particularly important to bees in springtime (“The Buzz in the Woods,” page 38), as early-flowering plants and trees provide important food before the full bloom of summer. And when things bloom has shifted over time, as revealed in a study of more than a hundred years’ worth of observations recorded at Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont (“A Century of Data Reveals Phenological Shifts,” page 12).
This issue also recounts the timeless joy of tossing maple samaras into the air to watch them twirl earthward (A Place in Mind, page 80) and of discovering edible treasures, as Ari Rockland-Miller writes in his first entry as Foraging columnist (page 33). It introduces the intriguing bombardier beetle (Invertebrate Bestiary, page 70) and covers some cringier invertebrates such as ticks (“Understanding Blacklegged Ticks and the Risk of Lyme Disease,” page 62) and spongy moths (“Spongy Moth Outbreaks,” page 42). And it delves in to the challenges of balancing what we seek within – and ask of – our forests, with a look at the history and the evolving present of the northernmost region of New Hampshire (“Connecticut Lakes Headwaters: Carbon vs. Cutting,” page 48), where management has shaped not only the forest, but also the human communities that live within and rely on it.
Within these pages there are also springtime observations that may border a bit more on the side of whimsy: “snoring” pickerel frogs (Naturally Curious, page 27), the appearance of “bunny ears” on emerging hobblebush leaves (Seasonal Notes, page 16), and a study that links moose poop to the health of a native earthworm (Discoveries, page 68).
As forester Julie Davenport notes in this issue’s Community Voices (page 58), “People’s stories are what connects them to the land. That’s what matters. That’s why people have land and why we still have forests – because people build connections to them.” We continue our endeavor to share the myriad stories – of stewardship, research, change, collaboration, challenges, joy – of our region’s forests. It’s the stories, after all, that connect us to the forest – and to each other, too.