Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [10]
In only three days after the warming began, crocuses peaked at our doorstep in an orgy of blue, white, and yellow bloom. Growing only along the sides of our dirt road, which was now finally again turning from spring mud to solid summer ground, the coltsfoot suddenly poked their brown flower buds through the soil and opened wide their bright yellow flowers. On the south-facing wooded slopes near our house, spring beauties, bloodroot, and hepaticas were opening their pink, snow-white, and blue and purple flowers to the sun. And the wind-pollinated trees—the quaking aspen, beaked hazel, and speckled alder—suddenly unfurled their tight flower buds to wave them in the warm breezes as though on signal, which indeed is what the warm pulse had been. The elm and red maples blossomed right on schedule as always, although the sugar maple, one of our most common trees and a most beautiful one when it is in full-splendored pale yellow bloom, chose not to flower this year. From Vermont to Maine the sugar maples were barren of flowers (although I found a single tree in flower next to our well in Maine). Willows were slower; they would be two days behind. However, no leaf bud anywhere had so far opened; nor would any open for weeks.
I saw my first orange and yellow bumblebee queen of the season as she was zigzagging close to the ground, as bees do when searching for a nest site. And two overwintering butterflies—the mourning cloak and Compton’s tortoiseshell—perched on a sugar maple trunk sucking sugar water at a lick a newly returned sapsucker had made on a tree next to our back door at the edge of the woods. Their wings were outspread to catch the warmth of the sun. “Our” phoebe finally examined potential nest sites, and a tree swallow sailed around the yard, before briefly examining a nest box and then departing. I’m sure it will be back soon with a mate. Early this morning one of a pair of blue jays tore off twigs from a viburnum bush along the driveway and flew off with them into the woods. It has begun building its nest foundation and will soon search for rootlets to line the nest.
Aside from walking around aimlessly and gawking, I have spent the last three mornings comfortably perched on a solid branch of a pine tree growing at the edge of our bog. I tucked myself comfortably up against the thick solid trunk, and leaned back in bliss behind a thin veil of branches that provided both concealment and a view. At dawn, an hour before the sun’s glare bleeds the colors, the bog was a study in pastels. There was no green vegetation at all, unless one looks at ground level to spy the blue-green tips of the sedge shoots beginning to pierce the winter-downed brown leaf blades. Aside from the chestnut brown sedge clumps (hummocks) that are surrounded by water, I saw an expanse of beige-yellow cattail swamp with dark brown seed heads that look black in the dawn. The water surface shimmered in colors ranging through black, tan, blue, and dark greenish where the light reflected from the pines at the edge of the beaver pond.
Light reflected from wavelets as muskrats and beavers swam at slow, steady, unvarying speed. Their noses and ears peeked out of the water, etching V’s in their wake. One beaver hauled itself out onto an old dam overgrown with viburnum bushes. Its shaggy coat glistened black as it bent over on its haunches and with its front paws brushed the fur on its head and behind its ears. Then it waddled back into the water and slid out of sight. I silently thanked the beavers, because with their dams and their constant cutting of brush and trees they have created this oasis of very varied life