This Week in the Woods, spring has finally arrived. Volunteers are on standby, monitoring temperatures and nighttime rain forecasts, to predict when spotted salamanders, wood frogs and other early spring amphibians will move to breeding pools.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of evidence of the new season. On south-facing slopes of hardwood forest, look for the battered purple leaves of sharp-lobed and blunt-lobed hepatica. Snow-flattened they may be, but these tough little plants will soon begin to green up, and produce some of spring’s most beautiful flowers.
More birds are arriving. Red-winged blackbirds and American robins came back a few weeks ago, and we’re now seeing hooded mergansers swimming in rivers. The photo in this gallery shows a male with his hood, or crest, down – at other times, he’ll display a bigger patch of white behind each bright yellow eye (the females have cinnamon colored crests). As we’ve noted in a previous year’s end-of-March posts, hoodies typically pair up in late autumn, an arrangement that helps them get an early start on breeding season. Also like wood ducks, hoodies nest in tree cavities, and their ducklings leap out of the tree (or duck box) within about a day of hatching, and follow their mother to water.
American woodcock have also just returned to their mating grounds – typically, open fields adjacent to hardwood forest that’s suitable for nesting, and also not far from wet areas that provide good hunting grounds for worms. They are, in other words, good mascot birds for the value of connected diverse habitats. If you sit very quietly next to a woods-edged field at dusk, you may hear male birds “peent,” (as we’ve written before, this sounds a bit like a froggy voice yelling, “BERT.”) You may also see the males perform their silly looking bobbing-up-and-down struts (search for “woodcock” and “dance” in Youtube to find videos of the birds set to pop music favorites, including Staying Alive, Smooth Criminal, and Uptown Funk). The strutting alternates with aerial “dancing” – twirling, twittering displays in the sky – which typically end with the male bird landing in almost the same spot where he took off into flight. Prime mating season is from now to May, and based on observations over the years, there seems to be a lot of aggression between the males (feather pulling in air, for example) in the earliest part of the season.
Ever since tiny, pepper-like springtails (snowfleas – though they aren’t actually fleas, or even insects) began appearing on top of the snow en masse, we’ve been noticing more snow-hardy spiders, which perhaps not coincidentally, eat springtails. The photo shows a species of long-jawed orb weaver – photographed in macro but actually no longer than a thumbnail – which rappelled from a tree onto a little boy’s hat. Here’s an article by Declan McCabe from the winter issue of Northern Woodlands, describing the green long-jawed spiders.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.
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