This Week in The Columbia Paper: "Spring Calling"
While
we normally space the timing of our columns and the corresponding
Nugget, this month we are doing both at the same time due to the
seasonal nature of the subject.
Spring Calling: Background
The Farmscape Ecology Program's Spring poster documents the annual
timing of different Spring happenings. It is currently hanging in
the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store alongside a log where people are
invited to record their own observations of Spring happenings.
The Wood Frog Life Cycle
The early Spring quacks of the Wood Frog that fill the air around
vernal pools signal the most conspicuous stage of this species' life
cycle. These are the breeding calls of male Wood Frogs, who
arrive first from the dispersed forest areas where they have
hibernated, and use their calls to attract the females. During a
brief week or two of breeding, the eggs are fertilized and laid in
gelatinous masses attached to sticks and other substrates in the water,
as can be seen in the below photo taken by Claudia this Spring.
The eggs develop and some (if lucky) will hatch into tadpoles, then
metamorphose into frogs in the small window they have before the vernal
pool dries up later in the summer. This is a risk worth taking
for the Wood Frog and vernal-pool amphibians like the Spotted
Salamander, as ephemeral pools cannot sustain many of the aquatic
predators that eat amphibian eggs. The juvenile Wood Frogs
disperse into the forest, where they spend the majority of their life
as terrestrial creatures. It is only when they have reached
breeding maturity after a year or two that these frogs will migrate, en
masse, back to the water - often the same vernal pools where they were
born.
For a photo essay of the Wood Frog life cycle, click here.
Claudia spotted this Wood Frog by a vernal pool this March.
Spring Changes Around Hawthorne Valley
If you are interested in some of the spring changes that Conrad and
Claudia have been noting around Hawthorne Valley (including more Wood
Frog pictures), or are interested to report findings of your own,
please visit our blog, Natural & Agricultural Observations In & Around Hawthorne Valley.
March 22 - Conrad studies an early flowering plant that he was asked to identify by a curious teacher.
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Spring Calling
by Anna Duhon
March 2012
- It seems everywhere I go these past few weeks, the signs of spring
are being noted. While waiting for a train this warm March
morning, for instance, I overheard a woman exclaim – “my Apricot trees
are already blossoming!” It’s been that kind of spring.
Blossoms, warmth, and a general greening are how I usually first notice
spring, but that has been changing in recent years – in large part due
to the frogs. Three years ago I happened to be walking in the
forest one early spring day and inadvertently stumbled into a
calamitous riot of quacking that I could only assume was some squadron
of ducks or geese about to crest the hill. None appearing, I
shifted my gaze from the blue sky, to the forest, to the ground around
my feet as it slowly dawned on me that the great commotion seizing the
forest was coming from a pool full of frogs. It was a realization
both shocking and thrilling.
I have since come to learn a little more about the life of these Wood
Frogs, who along with the Spotted Salamander and other amphibians,
await a warm, rainy night in early spring to migrate en masse from
their respective winter forest homes to the vernal pools where they
gather - with raucous quacking calls - to mate and lay their
eggs. Now with the first hint of warming days each year, an
anticipatory frog-shaped question mark begins to form in some deep part
of my mind, and I look for rainy nights and wonder if the frogs have
moved. It is for me the first sign of spring.
The Wood Frogs have been a good reminder of how much of the world
around us we do not see, unless we happen to stumble upon it or know to
look. My colleague Conrad, for instance, knows the vernal pools
in a wholly different way: at night, with the beam of a flashlight
shining on the backs of incoming amphibians. Speaking of the
spring amphibians, he said, “I think the most thrilling part of the
process for me is to actually see them arriving…the big Spotted
Salamanders are almost dinosaur-like when they’re coming to the pond
and you see them so rarely the rest of the year…so to go with a
flashlight and see them all descending from the hills….”
My experience with the Wood Frogs, and being around biologists, has
also showed me one entry point into a deeper world of seeing – noting
the cyclic happenings (the “phenology”) of the plants and animals as
they move through the seasons. Many people, from Thoreau to the
biologists whom I am fortunate to work among, have made a practice of
noting these changes and thus deepening their relationship with the
natural world. As Craig Holdrege, the director of the Nature
Institute, explains, “By every year attending to things and writing
them down you are more expectant and more observant…you go into each a
season wondering, ‘when are my old friends going to appear?’ and it is
- it is like going out and meeting an old friend.”
Each year my colleagues Conrad and Claudia hang a spring phenology
chart in the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store that records the “first”
observations for a long list of ‘old friends’ - spring happenings -
from the first call of the Spring Peepers to the flowering of the
Spicebush. Looking at this chart, one glimpses a rich spring
world missed by many, myself included. When I ask Conrad and
Claudia about their favorite things to look for this time of year, they
speak of flying ants, the teapot-shaped male Woodcocks that shoot up
into the air then whoosh down in an energetic mating display, and the
flowering Red Maples that provide early nectar to the emerging
bees. Another favorite is the first appearance of the butterflies
– both the ones that hibernate, such as the Mourning Cloak or Comma,
who come out on a warm day to take their first drink from the sap
trickling down the Maples, and those, such as the Cabbage White, that
overwinter as larvae or chrysalises.
When I ask Craig Holdrege about his favorite spring changes, he speaks
of the emergence of the early flowering Skunk Cabbage that warms and
melts the snow and ice around it (though not this year), the returns of
the bigger flocks of geese flying north, the first Bluebirds looking to
nest, the Wood Frog chorus, and a procession of spring flowers:
“I always like to go out in the woods in the next weeks and
follow which of the wildflowers come up in the woodlands…in the more
rocky, somewhat dry areas, Hepatica will be flowering soon…by contrast
down in the bottom areas where the soil is richer, Bloodroot will be
coming up soon, with lovely big white flowers. I always wait for
them as wonderful harbingers of spring, and then everything begins to
follow.”
Spring is assuredly here, and it has many calls – whether the Wood Frog
chorus or the unfurling of flowers – that invite us to note the new
life and greet the ‘old friends.’
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