This week in the woods, if all this mud and snow has you feeling a bit desperate to see flowering plants, consider cutting some red maple stems and putting them in a jar of water on a window sill. If you inspect a stem, you’ll see that the buds are starting to swell, and cut stems in a warm house will flower relatively quickly. Most tree flowers don’t get a lot of attention, which is a shame – many of them are beautiful. Here’s a look at three tree flowers of spring, including red maple, from a 2019 “What in the Woods is That?” quiz, and here’s a related Outside Story article by Susan Shea.
Another sign of early spring is the return of American woodcock (this photo is from Spring 2023), which are just starting to peent and “dance” in fields and other open spaces. We’ve written about these birds before, and they’re one of our all-time favorites. For starters, they’re loveable oddballs, with upside-down brains, protuberant eyes set far back on their heads that afford them a broad range of vision, ears positioned below those eyes, and hinged top bill tips (yes really) that can open to grasp worms and other prey. They also have funky dance moves: the males choose a patch of open space and bob up and down to impress the females, rocket high up into the sky, and perform twirling, twittering “dances” before gliding back to the ground and starting the whole process over again. (The bird’s wings make the twittering noise.) Here’s an article from our archive, describing woodcocks’ habitat needs.
What have you noticed in the woods this week? Submit a recent photo for possible inclusion in our monthly online Reader Photo Gallery.