Something Wild

Forests keep us healthy.

Mid-May is like rush hour in the bird world. Migrants have returned for the nesting season and the air is full of birdsong. As you might guess, birdsong is as varied as birds themselves. In fact, birdsong is defined generously to include any and all sounds they make with territorial or courtship intentions. Let's start with a traditional vocalization and then branch out.  

One of the most common and widespread backyard songsters is well named: The song sparrow. The male starts early and will sing all day especially if he hasn't been successful in attracting a mate. One male studied sang from dawn to dusk; fifteen hours! Two-thousand three-hundred and five songs performed in the day. Here's that song, recognized by a few repeated introductory notes followed by quite a mix.

It’s not just anglers who follow emerging mayflies. The drama plays to appreciative audiences above and below the water. Hatching nymphs rise from dark, watery depths up to the wide blue sky, a glorious curtain call and tolling dinner bell.

By May, the tree swallows – a troupe of aerial acrobats – wheel, dip, and tumble while hawking insects over the river. Beaks dimple glassy water. They rise and fall in an acrobatic synchronized feeding ballet, alternately showing iridescent green backs and snow-white breasts, like two-toned cottonwood leaves blown over the river from surrounding woods.

May brings apple blossoms, a universal favorite—whether in hillside orchard or backyard crabapple. They're also favored by one of the most elegant songbirds of all, cedar waxwings. They're a social species but sedate and quiet as birds go—easy to miss despite traveling in flocks.

Often the best way to know they're around is by their song. It's subtle, admittedly, but worth learning. Once alerted by their song, here's what you might see: male and female waxwings exchange blossoms bill-to-bill as part of a courtship ritual when winter flocks pair off for the breeding season ahead.

Lovely woodland wildflowers are reliable “indicators” of soil moisture, fertility and light conditions. Wildflowers on the forest floor repeat patterns seen elsewhere each spring. The flowers speak to the patterns of why plants and trees grow where they do in our forests. 

"Red Trillium" and the small delicate pink and white candy-striped "Spring Beauty" bloom in enriched soil sites. Here leaves collect against stonewalls beneath sugar maples, white ash and basswood which also indicate fertile loam soils. On the opposite end of the soil spectrum, bright yellow "Coltsfoot" looks like a coarse, stubby Dandelion. It grows from nutrient-poor sand and silt found in roadside ditches. Its name derives from the notched shape of its leaves.

The ants come marching, one by one, up the kitchen wall; it’s a sure sign of spring. These are the worker ants, females all, tasked with delivering food to the colony. Male drones remain in that colony, on call for their one role in a very brief life: mating with a fertile female destined to be a new queen.

All ant species work all the time for the survival of their colony. The first ant species evolved from wasps some 120 million years ago, shedding wings for a terrestrial life—for the most part.But back to those kitchen ants, single file and single purpose.When an ant finds food she lays a pheromone or chemical-scent trail on her way back to the colony that communicates "This way to the food!"Other scents communicate the wide range of information needed for colony survival.

In April, forest trees leaf-out casting shade. When buds open, most tree flowers bloom inconspicuously. But some rural roadsides and pasture edges are accentuated by the stunning white full bloom of a small native tree whose Latin scientific name is Amelanchier arborea. 

It has several colorful common names including "Flowering Shad" or "Shadbush" or "Serviceberry" and "June Berry." The small shrubby tree forms a vase-like clump of smooth gray-barked stems which blossom when the leaves are half grown.  Gardeners plant Shadbush as a popular, native ornamental landscape specimen.

As anglers dust off their tackle boxes, it's a great time to make sure that all the lead is out. Decades of research by the Loon Preservation Committee in Moultonborough has proven the toxicity of lead fishing tackle to wildlife. One lead sinker an ounce or less in weight can kill a loon in a matter of weeks. Loons swallow grit and pebbles that help to grind up food, and sometimes there's a sinker in the gravelly mix. Fishermen lose a lot of sinkers. 

Lead-weighted hooks, called jigs, are another matter. Often they get snagged or swallowed by the fish that gets away—and then become prey for a range of wildlife including herons and eagles, as well as loons.