“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
March is when we expect (and some of us hope for) those late winter storms that can dump ten inches or more of wet heavy snow. Yesterday it rained an inch. It’s raining again today. At least we won’t have to shovel! Not the best conditions for a walk, but why not? Things are happening out there.
Getting soaking wet. Despite recent temperatures in the 40s and 50s, the ground is still frozen and shunts the rain down slope as fast as it falls, filling every dip and swale. Ephemeral puddles, ponds, and even small lakes dot the landscape: a late “winter waterland” with Faville Marsh as full as we’ve seen it, as are other surrounding wetlands. We hoped that perhaps there might still be a chance to walk out onto the frozen marsh to see things up close one more time, but that was wishful thinking. The ice is already honeycombed and too soft to trust.
Staking out this year's territory
This of course is of no concern to the recently arrived Canada geese; we imagine they are quite grateful for the changing conditions. But, they are not pleased at all with our intrusion in their reclaimed territory. We can see at least four pairs out there standing on the water-covered ice, plus a single goose high on a muskrat lodge, most likely staking it out as its soon-to-be nesting site, complaining with incessant honking as we pass by. Up ahead, first a pair of mallards and then a pair of hooded mergansers take the geese’s discontent seriously, and explosively take wing from a small area of open water close to shore. Further out, with nary a sound, a pair of sandhill cranes on lanky legs struts away across the slushy marsh toward greater security, as a lone muskrat sits nearby pondering it all. The now driving rain evidently doesn’t suit our other early migrants – red-winged blackbirds, robins and killdeer – who arrived at Faville Grove just days ago, as they are nowhere to be seen.
As we pause and watch this awakening theatre, we admire the hues of the marsh and its surrounding landscape, which have deepened with the rain: a subtle palette of tawny browns, magentas, golds, and tans. Even the unweathered cedar boards of the ten new wood duck houses, recently installed by neighbor Ohne Raasch, have taken on a richer glow. The foliage of the leatherleaf (a close relative of blueberry), which seems to flourish in the zone between the sedge meadow/sphagnum bog and the shrub-carr, is already responding and taking on its characteristic dusty gray-green pinkish color as it rehydrates after the winter’s cold drying winds. Here and there in the shallows of the marsh’s edge the first willows are opening their silver catkins, those soft pussy willows we have long awaited, heralding too that spring is upon us.
But now, here comes that snow. We might have to shovel after all, but at least it won’t last long.
