NoNewsFromHere: 2018-04-22

Just fooling. It wasn't tulip time, but some color was needed through the dreary days of February, March, and yes, April

It was T. S. Eliot who said “April is the cruelest month,” though he may have meant it metaphorically. It was true this year, though, literally. It was not until the April 21 that we actually experienced a day of spring. The poem continues:

“….breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

But he was thinking England, surely, because there were no lilacs breeding here, and in Vermont the lilacs sleep through even pleasanter Aprils. Let me give you an example: the crocuses below sprouted about a month ago, their usual time, but didn’t open until April 21. They tried earlier, but there was nothing doing. Too much snow. Yet here the valley is Vermont’s "Banana Belt."

The snow melted two days after this photo, taken April 21.

*

It’s obvious to me now that I spent much of February, March and much of April in fairly thoughtless mode. I kept up with the carousel of our country’s news (read: Trump and his Cabinet of Destruction) with the steady horror at things falling apart. And that, somehow, kept me mentally hemmed in. What could I possibly say about it all? Where to begin? How could I think and write about small things and ignore all the ugliness? Well, I will anyway. Enough!

*

Okay, now that it’s spring (fingers crossed), there has been a progression of events. After eight springs now (the first spring having been 2011) it has become predictable, more or less. The first to be noticed was the red-winged blackbirds that returned early in April. I wondered how they could cope in the ice and snow. It seemed too early. Then goldfinches began to crowd the bird feeder, along with juncos, mourning doves, an occasional titmouse, plus the woodpeckers who have been nabbing seeds and suet all along when they’re not pecking on the house itself. Hawks, falcons, and crows began to dot the sky in greater numbers, sometimes flying low enough I hear the flap of their wings. In the big pond visitors, besides the resident muskrats, included geese and ducks.

Goldfinches waiting their turn at the bird feeder, and not politely either. The bird feeder has since moved to its summer location.

Next in line were the frogs. Not the spring peepers you find in vernal pools–all the others. In abundance. The natural pool was only completed in mid-August, so this is its first spring. Last summer frogs found it immediately. In April I waited over several weeks for the ice to disappear so I could see what lay below. Finally the ice was gone, only to be replaced by a soupy slush. When at last the water was completely unfrozen it looked dark with algae, the predictable result of six months without a filter pump.

There had been plenty of frogs that found this man-made pond to their liking during the warm weather. Why some preferred this pond to the more natural pond I can’t guess. One day grandson Ben deported every frog he could find, about half a dozen, to the other pond–a kindness, because his sister doesn’t like to swim with frogs–yet hours later we again counted about half a dozen frogs in the pool. Whether or not these were frogs he had missed earlier or whether they were our ex-deportees was never established.

With the pump filter re-installed the water began to clear. I skimmed out wads of algae, grayish-white to dark green, matted and slimy, and added some algae-eating bacteria. As the water cleared I looked for frogs that overwintered, wondering if I would find any. Frogs need to burrow at least partially under mud in winter to survive. Their bodies enter a state of torpor, a kind of hibernation. They continue to breathe oxygen through parts of their skin exposed to water. ,They don't freeze as of course no pond or lake freezes all the way to the bottom.

The new pool offers only stones for burrowing whereas the big pond is all mud. Would a frog really try to hibernate in the pool?

I soon found two frogs laying at the bottom of the pool, right-side up but splayed out, with legs spread. The position seemed odd, but I hadn't been able to discover what frogs hiberating might look like. Was it dead? Alive? Or still dormant? When I found neither frog had moved, even after a couple of days, I took them out of the pool with my skimmer–still no movement–and slipped them into the big pond. And there they remained for the next week. When I checked them again, they were still in the same spot, only now covered with silt. I prodded them. Nothing.

This frog in the big pond was surely dead.

Back at the pool, looking for other possibly dead frogs, I found what looked from a distance like a huge spread-eagled frog and caught it in the skimmer. When the skimmer broke the surface I was surprised to find there were two frogs in it, one, oddly, with its mouth open and all four legs clamped around the body of a second spread-legged frog that looked dead. Before I had a chance to move the skimmer there was a movement–it’s alive!– and it/they were both were back in the water. Was this a thing? One frog holding on to another? Was this a kind of survival behavior? Alas, the questions remain unanswered. My only conclusions: (a) a frog in the spread-legged position is more than likely dead, and (b) a frog can survive winter in the pool, rocky bottom and all. But if I were a frog, I wouldn’t count on it.

The live frog clamped around the dead frog. Why?

Another thing you notice before the leaves fill out and blur the landscape so beautifully is that the trees have been growing while you weren't paying attention. Each spring becomes a sort of stock-taking in this way, as you find yourself remembering how everything looked just a short time ago. In 2010 I see the house before the porch was built, the pond when its edges were kept trimmed like a golf course water trap, the always-weedy herb bed before the pool, the sapling maple when you could still make the whole tree shake by pushing the trunk. I took my first photo of goldfinches swarming the bird feeder in April 20100. Pictures of nesting barn swallows and hummingbirds soon followed.