MELT

Ice, rocks, leaves

ONE DAY last week some neighborhood cows decided to take a stroll.  An entire herd of twenty or so decided to mosey down Hallock Road, past our house and on down the hill north of our property.  Somewhere around the bend they paused to munch some stubby grasses in a field.  Eating out, you could say.  According to my daughter and neighbor, a couple of guys had come by asking if anyone had seen a bunch of cows.  “We looked where they was supposed to be and the gate was open and all of them was like, gone.”  They found their cows.  After some hooting and hollering and a couple of toots of a car horn the herd was persuaded to stroll in the other direction, back up the hill toward the farm to our south, their home for better or worse.  They’d probably walked a half mile all in all.  It seemed like a pleasant outing, all things considered.  I like to think their adventure was brought about less by opportunity, the gate left carelessly open, and  more because spring was in the air and they got the itch to travel. 

The herd moves up Hallock Road

SPRING IS HERE, or coming, anyway.  It’s hard to be sure because there have been mixed signals.  Skiing is still viable in the mountains.  Both Sugarbush and the Middlebury Snow Bowl are open, although Rikert’s cross country trails have closed for the season.  Yet there is melt, and plenty of it.  All the rivers are high and low-lying fields have become temporary lakes, receiving visits from ducks and newly arriving geese.  Our own pond is momentarily stuck in two seasons, evidence for which is a duo of mergansers (symbolizing spring) swimming amongst small icebergs (winter, obviously).  The two main flows that feed the pond are almost streams:  one drains down the hill from the south, and the other drains more slowly from the western border along the road.  Still––magic will happen––it could be only days before stains of green appear.

March

Pond in early April

Normally a field, now a lake, complete with geese

WE HAVE HEARD red-winged blackbirds in the field.  They will be nesting there when the grasses begin to grow.  A great blue heron flew overhead as I drove on the road to Middlebury.  Skunks are on the prowl.  Salamanders are laying their eggs.  Rodents find themselves exposed as the snow melts over their pathways.  Daisy and Skyler uncovered a vole last week that became, after I tossed its body into the woods, food for some other scavenger.  Now is when baby opossums are born, babies so tiny that some twenty could fit into a teaspoon.  Hardly viable at that stage, they have to find their way to the opossum’s pouch if they are to survive.  The Virginia opossum has been emigrating north in recent years as the climate warms and is no longer uncommon here.  (I remember reading many years ago when we lived further south in Lexington, Massachusetts, when opossums were first spotted in the area––it was a novel occurrence then––with frost-bitten toes and ear tips. I hope they have evolved since then!)  Woodchuck litters are being born right about now.  A woodchuck family, we can say with confidence, has been living under our patio for some time.  As the snow melts we find piles of pebbles that were layered under the concrete and are now piled up next to large holes.  The evidence speaks for itself.  Skyler and Daisy have investigated numerous holes in the lawn behind the house that suggest an extensive network of tunnels.  A little contraception among woodchucks would be a plus.

Pebbles dug up from under the patio in the dried oregano bed

BUCK MOUNTAIN forest area behind us is extensive, not one of those small interrupted woodland plots that have become so common with development and tend to lack animal corridors.  This particular woodland, like many parts of the Champlain Valley consists, at least in part, of what is called a “clayplain forest.”  Trees there consist mostly of white and red oak, red maple, white pine, shagbark hickory (a tree favored by bats, where they exist), white ash, hemlock, sugar maple (syrup!) and beech, among others.  

This is the forest that dominated the clay and silt soils of the Champlain Valley prior to European settlement and the subsequent conversion of forest to agricultural land. Today this forest community is extremely rare. The clay soils were deposited in the Champlain Valley during and following the Pleistocene glaciation, both when the valley was flooded by a large freshwater lake, and later when salt water invaded the basin from the north. The soils are deep and fertile, and make ideal agricultural soils, especially when drained. Moisture in these soils varies with soil texture and topographic position, and the most well drained areas were the ones preferentially cleared for agriculture. The Valley Clayplain Forest remnants that are left are generally on the moister sites, though they typically contain a mosaic of wet and less-wet areas. In some areas, thin lenses of sand lie over the clay.*

THE FOREST DEER migrate slightly eastward during the winter, toward the higher elevations and larger forest areas.  A large nearby field abutting forest alongside route 17A is an area considered a “deer yard,” the name for a site where deer tend to hang out.  Higher elevations and to our east is where the moose are more likely to hang out.  Ken’s grandson Spencer has found numerous discarded moose antlers in the forest around Bristol.  There must be no shortage of moose.  A few weeks ago Spencer’s dad spotted a bobcat.  We haven’t seen one ourselves, but at least three bobcat dens have been noted by wildlife researchers in the Buck Mountain area, not far from where we are.  I talked to someone last week who said she had seen a catamount (Vermont’s word for mountain lion), the presence of which remains officially unacknowledged. 

Bill Norland captured this shot of a bobcat

MAKING SYRUP is the best sign of the season change, with hope for the warmish days and cold nights that make the sap flow.  Those kinds of days haven't been abundant.  The cold weather lasted far too long and it may be too late for a good maple syrup season.  A few weeks of the right weather is optimal.  Lovely spring weather is not particularly optimal.   Chris tended the boil this past weekend with a record low amount of sap but with a new and better evaporator pan and some professional quality filters.  We may yet have at least a small amount of excellent syrup.

The sugar house, wood stacked and ready

Tending the boil inside the sugar house. A trough of sap (foreground) awaits

 ***

LOCAL ISSUE UPDATE (For readers of the previous post)

It was inevitable.  As I suggested in the posting called “Local Issue,” a petition for a re-vote of the decision to build a new Town Office building has been submitted to the Middlebury Selectboard.  Some 250 required signatures were gathered and are now in the process of being verified.  Still, it will be an uphill battle for the diehard opposition.  The side that voted “NO” will not only have to win the re-vote (the original vote at March’s town meeting was 915 to 798 opposed), but must win with a majority plus two-thirds of the “Yes” vote.  Since the “Yes” vote numbered 915 they will need 603 (66% of 915) additional votes on their side. 

An ironic sidelight of this petition drive is that the person who initiated it (not, by the way, the chief voice of the opposition at the March town meeting) has an interesting set of reasons for his desire to undo the vote.  He would like a new Town Office to be built on the outskirts of town, the recreation center to be in an entirely different location than the one overwhelmingly voted way earlier, and, what’s more, claims to have a plan (no drawings, no consulting engineers or architects involved) that would, according to his own calculations, cost less than the present plan.  Well, lots more, actually, since Middlebury College’s huge contribution would be out of the picture.  These notions blithely ignore the opposition’s (supposedly) passionate concern, expressed with great vigor in March, about moving the town offices as much as 300 feet from its present location.  I guess the idea is to overturn the vote any old way–­–who cares what the reasons are!

Once more, stay tuned!

*Excerpted from "Wetland, Woodland, Wildland: A Guide to the Natural Communities of Vermont," E.H. Thompson and E.R. Sorenson. 2000 and 2005. Published by The Nature Conservancy and Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, distributed by University Press of New England.