Colors of Spring

Spring comes with a profusion of spring flowers, the first butterflies and moths and birds in breeding colors.

What a joy it is to wander through the Big Woods observing the ephemeral spring flowers that bloom before trees’ leaves emerge. In fields and woodland openings we can see butterflies; in those and in other places birds are courting, their bright colors gleaming.

A few of those colors of spring – 

Spring's over now, summer's here with extreme temperatures, but we can all anticipate the return of the colors of spring next year.

One Morning in May

One morning in late May I decided to head for the hills – the Muncy Hills that is. I’ve written about the Muncy Hills in previous posts, specifically this one from last year about a search for pink lady’s-slipper.

It was time to search for those beautiful orchids once again in the area where, in June 1978, I’d found a huge colony of pink lady’s-slipper –

Up through the remnants of the old red pine plantation and into a stand of black birch and red maple. There was the first lady’s-slipper plant, two leaves, but no flower – 

The search continued until 11 plants had been found, but only two had bloomed. One of those plants had a dried-up/wilted flower, the other had a year-old seed capsule side-by-side with this year’s dried-up/wilted flower –

From hundreds, perhaps thousands, of plants in bloom on June 8, 1978 to only 11 plants of which only two had bloomed in early May in 2024. Old records indicate that many plants are blooming a couple of weeks earlier than they did 150 years ago, here we had pink lady’s-slipper blooming a month earlier than they did a mere 46 years ago – thanks climate change!

So down the hill I went until – from almost beneath my foot burst a female ovenbird, the small warbler that looks like a miniature thrush. She went into a broken-wing act –

Ovenbirds build a well-camouflaged domed nest resembling an earthen oven on the ground. This is one I found several years ago –

I cautiously looked for the nest, being careful to only step in open spots where the ground was flat, but couldn’t find it among the fern, crowsfoot and fallen leaves. Taking a seat against one of the birch trees with good view of the area where the nest was located ...

... it was a matter of waiting to see if the female would return; so I donned a camo face mask and draped a sniper’s veil over my shoulders and arms. Twenty minutes later there she was, having flown into the lower limbs of a small hemlock –

 

 

After flitting from branch to branch, she moved to one small birch and then to another –

 

 

The ovenbird was very cautious and wary, but eventually descended to the ground where she was hard to see among the ferns and crowsfoot. I had but one glimpse of her before she vanished –

Now that she was back on the nest, it was time to quietly pack up and head back to the car.

You Never Know

On a spring morning I was looking for wildflowers in the Big Woods – in a large hemlock stand that hadn’t been logged for at least 100 years. There were a lot of round-lobed hepaticas, but it was a cool morning and few of the flowers were open. Thousands of trout-lily leaves blanketed the ground, but buds were extremely scarce.

However, you never know what you may find.

Suddenly I was startled by a duck flushing from the base of a large hemlock less than 50 feet away. My first thought was that it was a female wood duck, but as it flew to the nearby stream I realized that it was a female mallard.

There at the base of the hemlock was her nest, containing over a dozen eggs. On this cool morning I didn’t want to keep her off the eggs for long, so, after snapping a couple of photos, it was time to move on.

The mallard had chosen a strange place to nest, far from the type of wetland where her species usually nests. And when the eggs hatch, what about the ducklings – where will they find the insects they usually eat, where will they hide from predators in these open woods? The stream's a typical mountain stream, no emergent vegetation or log jams – no place to hide there.

I walked on, still searching for blooms. After not finding many flowers in bloom I turned around and crossed a small drainage to return whence I had come. The hemlock where the nest was located was quite distinctive –

When it came into view about 250 feet away, the camera’s telephoto lens revealed that the female mallard had returned and was on the nest incubating her eggs –

Leaving her to her duties I went on searching for flowers.

You just never know what you may see in forest or field.