In the Right Place: All in the Family

The male flowers (“catkins”) of the speckled alders (Alnus incana) are now hanging like dormant insects in their dense shrubs.

These catkins soon will be releasing streams of pollen to smother the smaller female catkins that conveniently grow on the same shrub. Thus, the plant can self-pollinate as a “monoecious” species.

Unfortunately, the shrub’s profuse pollen clouds also can torment human allergy sufferers and its propensity to propagate in dense clusters can be a nuisance on pastures and other areas intended for clearways. However, the plant prefers wetlands. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 6 and 7, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Of Emergence, Exodus, and Easter

Below you’ll see maple tree buds emerging in the light of yesterday morning’s (2:18 a.m.) virtually-full moon. That spring moon was at its fullest on April 6, but clouds obscured it until last night.

The April full moon traditionally is known in North America as the “pink full moon” due to its arrival near the time that flowers and trees begin to bloom, especially pink creeping phlox (Phlox subulate), a wildflower native to eastern North America.

However, this year, the April full moon is special: It is a “Paschal full moon.” “Paschal,” pronounced “PA-skl,” means “of or pertaining to Passover or Easter.” This moon arrived during Passover, the Jewish celebration of liberation and exodus, and its appearance determined that today would be Easter, the Christian celebration of resurrection and ascendance.

As you may know, Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the full moon that rises on or after the northern spring (vernal) equinox. (However, if that full moon rises on a Sunday, Easter will occur the following Sunday.) Passover also typically begins on the night of the full moon after the spring equinox (unless leap months change that time). (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 8, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Early Spring

Other than the yet-to-come green leaves and field grasses, yesterday morning had everything you’d want in an early spring day: temperatures somewhere between chill and thrill; sky big and blue; fluffy clouds slowly parading by,  and the sea breeze mingling with that nostril-flaring scent of damp earth drying in a bright sun.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 7, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Fashion Department

Here we apparently have an adult Herring Gull in breeding plumage. Dressing for success with the opposite sex seems to be nature’s usual way.

Below, we apparently have an immature Herring Gull that probably is just immerging from its first winter. Designing baby clothes so as not to attract attention also seems to be nature’s usual way.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 5, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Delicate

It’s raining again this morning. April showers may bring May flowers, but they also can create wheel-sucking mud and potholes in the many narrow dirt roads that we have in the back areas of Maine.

Frugal Mainers know that the perfect device for giving those roads the delicate maintenance that they need in the spring is an old, towed grader such as the one shown here working on Tuesday:

They can be towed by a truck, tractor, or even horses if necessary. This one was towed by a truck:

But, the grader operator needs to have excellent eye-hand coordination to steer while adjusting the height and angle of the blade. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 21 [back view] and April 4 [side view], 2023.)

In the Right Place: Yellow Hello

This unusual all-yellow colony of eastern skunk cabbage spathes that we reported on last month has not (yet?) changed colors or become mottled. As you probably know, these pixie-hatted spathes contain the flowers that allow the plants to propagate.

I haven’t been able to find a reliable explanation of how the color yellow could dominate all others that usually are found on the plants’ spathes. Perhaps the reason is not only biological, but also meteorological due to effects climate change. I’ll keep monitoring these unusual plants to see if they change color or their leaves are different from the norm. Scientific explanations are invited.

Prior to this year, I had only seen eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) spathes that were a deep red/purple color or mottled in various colors. In fact, those are the colors of all of the spathes near the yellow ones:

Western skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) has all-yellow spathes, but that is a distinctly different species. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 3 [yellow] and 4 [red, mottled], 2023.)

In the Right Place: High Hopes

Yesterday, I watched this male wood duck apparently trying to court what appear to be larger female mallard ducks:

A little research revealed that ambitious wood ducks sometimes are successful in mating with larger mallards, but their hybrid offspring often are infertile.

For some reason (probably senility), this dapper little wood duck brought to my old mind the optimistic song “High Hopes,” especially the Grammy- and Oscar-winning child’s chorus version by Frank Sinatra. In it, an ant moves a “rubber tree plant” and a ram butts a hole in a “billion-kilowatt dam” because they had “high, apple pie in the sky hopes.” (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 3, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Wind and Whitewater

Our April Fool’s Day rains created tumultuous stream flows, including this one in Patten Stream yesterday:

That powerful whitewater, combined with yesterday’s high winds, resulted in some damage to the fyke nets closest to the mouth of the Stream; others seemed unaffected:

As viewers of these posts know, the nets are set to catch migrating baby American eels (also known as elvers or glass eels) that are seeking to swim upstream after a long trip apparently from the Saragossa Sea. (Images taken in Surry, Maine, on April 2, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Rhythms

What could be more fitting? April arrived yesterday with her proverbial showers that will bring May flowers, as well as skunk cabbage leaves from this plant.

A spring rain is a good time to get booted and walk slowly through a bog, smell the wet earth and emerging flora, and listen for raindrops plinking their own targets. If you take your hands off your mental wheel there, you sometimes can imagine feeling the faint rhythms of a different life.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on April 1. 2023.)

March Postcards From Maine

Proverbially, March is expected to come in like a lion and leave like a lamb. This year, however, she wasn’t as threatening as a lion upon arriving nor as sweet as a lamb when she left. She didn’t seem to know what she was. Her moods swung quickly from brightly sunny to morose gray, to bouts of furious wind and rain, and interludes of snow, sometimes sprinkled delicately, sometimes heaved explosively.

Nonetheless, her sunny days were stunning:

March’s other moods often were dramatic and sometimes starkly beautiful, but always interesting. To be sure, the snow had to be plowed and the rain turned March into our “mud season,” as usual. But, the glory of the sun appearing after heavy snow or rain storms made up for the inconveniences.

Our earliest flora began to emerge in March. The pixie-hats (spathes) of the eastern skunk cabbage this year emerged from the wet bogs not only in their usual mottled colors, but sometimes in an unusual all-yellow form. The fur paws of the pussy willows appeared as well, and the sap began to run in the maple trees, where it was rerouted into the plastic tubes that maple syrup producers use to collect it.

Although we had a fair amount of snow, there was no dangerous blizzard; intervening thaws enabled the wildlife to get by without much trouble. The white-tailed deer just nosed through the snow; the dawn bobcat waited for the thaws to hunt; the male wild turkeys began their spring struts on schedule, and the Canada geese (many already paired) began migrating through.

On the working waterfront, the fishing vessels continued the winter Atlantic scallop season, sometimes getting covered in ice on cold days. The elver (“glass eel”) season opened in March here and fyke nets were strung across stream mouths to catch these highly-prized (and highly-priced) baby American eels.

One of the entertainment highlights of the month was the performance at the Ellsworth Grand Theater of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera “The Pirates of Penzance.” As you may know, this features the kind-hearted Pirate King and his inept pirates; the officious Sergeant and his cowardly constables; and the blustering Major-General and his unmarried daughters, including Mabel who carries on outrageously with Frederick, the young pirate who wants to retire.

Finally, we leave you with the March full moon appearing on one of the month’s more turbulent nights:

(All images in this post were taken in Downeast Maine during March of 2023.)

In the Right Place: The Last New Snow (Maybe)

It’s time to say goodbye to March, our most fickle month. She’s not going out like the proverbial lamb; on the other hand, she’s no longer the lion that she was earlier. Maybe she’s going out like a ram, given her cold exit temperatures, gusty winds, and yesterday morning’s tantrum of powdery snow.

That snow, shown in the image above, had melted away in the North Field by mid-afternoon yesterday, but it just might be the last new snow that we see until next winter. At the time that this image was taken, though, the temperature was only 29°F (wind chill = 19°) and the wind was gusting from the North-Northwest up to 25 miles per hour (note the white caps coming into Great Cove). On the other hand, the ice was out of the pond (partly shown on lower left) and likely will not return.

(Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 30, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Highs and Lows

Here you see the incoming tide at Conary Cove yesterday afternoon. There’s usually more than a 9-foot tide in the Cove, which is in Blue Hill Bay. That’s 9 feet of water measured vertically, not horizontally, that comes in and goes out about every 6 hours.

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day; this morning we woke to a light snowfall. (Image taken in Blue Hill, Maine, on March 29, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Wattle He Do Next

Male wild turkeys have begun to strut here, part of their highly competitive social system in which dominance displays play major roles. Doing the strut is not easy; it’s a grueling engineering and chemical feat.

The Tom’s display involves flexing an interconnected series of muscles in his skin to erect and hold steady feathers that are imbedded in his body, wings, and tail. And, he enters and holds the pose with fully flexed muscles hundreds of times a day. At the same time, he is contracting blood vessels in his head to change exposed skin colors into garish blues and reds, lengthen his beak snood, and enhance the appearance of his neck wattles.

The inflammation of the wattles on the Tom’s neck reportedly is very attractive to turkey hens when they finally get into the mood to mate (which does not appear to be now from what I’ve seen). The size and redness of the Tom’s wattles are correlated with high testosterone levels and good health – in other words, a bright, hefty wattle indicates a desirable mate to a hen. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 26, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Oh Buoy!

Here’s an opportunity to admire some Maine spring landscaping; note the distinctive use of evergreens to distract attention from the winter-scarred earth and soften the hard edges of structures.

On the other hand, you may want to look at this image and think about lobster trap buoys, icons that are at the center of a controversy, a dilemma, actually.

Distinctly-colored lobster trap buoys such as these mark a fisherman’s territory. However, they also are at the center of a debate about whether lobster fishing equipment is further endangering North Atlantic right whales, an already endangered species.

The buoys are attached to ropes that descend to the sets of traps on the sea bottom. Some say that these lines hanging vertically in the ocean by the thousands present a risk of fatal entanglement for whales. I’m aware of no evidence of such entanglement in the coastal waters here, but the subject is a serious one that needs a reasonable solution. Otherwise, I fear that lobster fishing here could be throttled by new regulations and equipment expenses that would make the profession as endangered as the whales.

One proposed solution that is being tested is the so-called “on-call” buoy, which doesn’t float on the surface until summoned. It’s a buoyant spool of line attached to an anchor on the sea bottom and linked to the trap set there. To retrieve their traps, lobstermen would trigger the “on-call” buoy with a timer or acoustic signal. The buoy then would detach itself from its anchor and float to the surface while unspooling its line, which would be used to haul up its traps.

Whether on-call buoys can be made to withstand the rigors of sea life and the limits of fishermen’s budgets is yet to be shown, however. Worrisome times. (Image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 27, 2023.)

In the Right Place: How Sweet It Is

Yesterday was the 40th annual Maine Maple Syrup Sunday and this transfusion-like plastic tubing is the only type of equipment that we found collecting the sap from local maple trees:

Such tree-to-tree tubing systems can collect sap from hundreds of trees at a time. It appears that labor-intensive collecting with buckets or cans mostly has gone the way of rotary phones locally, at least since 2017, when this image was taken:

Vermont traditionally is the leading state producer of maple syrup by far (2.5 million reported gallons in 2022), followed by New York (845 thousand gal.) and Maine (672 thousand gal.)

On Maine Maple Syrup Sunday weekends, many producers here open up their “sugarhouses” and offer syrup samples and demonstrations of how the glorious pancake enhancer is made. (Images taken in Sargentville, Maine, on March 26, 2023 [tubes], and March 19, 2017 [can].)

In the Right Place: Call of the Wild

We’re seeing quite a few flying wedges of Canada Geese lately, a perennial harbinger of spring that usually produces more honking than a New York City traffic jam. Here’s one headed north yesterday that appeared and passed over me before I could get a decent “shot”:

A better look at their winged beauty can be seen in this Leighton Archive image of them rising from as local pond:

Leighton Archives Image

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is our largest goose and one of our most American birds, perhaps the best known and most widely distributed waterfowl on the North American continent. Climate warming has resulted in increasing numbers of these geese overwintering in Maine and producing young that are non-migratory. However, we still see and hear many of these loudmouths on their way north to their namesake country. (Primary image taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 25, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Pregnant Paws

Here you see the fur-like catkins of the American pussy willow (Salix discolor) doing their jobs yesterday. That “fur” only appears on male pussy willows to protect their pollen from the elements.

These male flowers have no petals or scent; they’re just stamens loaded with pollen. The fur soon will disappear, and the spring winds will torment the pollen into a yellow storm that will pollinate nearby female shrubs and agitate nearby human noses.

Pussy willow catkins usually are the first sign that winter has lost its grip, although we’re never surprised by an April snowfall here. (By the way, “catkins” is a botanical term for slim flower clusters with tiny or nonexistent petals; the term is not limited to plants that have feline-sounding names.)

Of course, the common name for this furry plant, “pussy willow,” is due to the resemblance of its catkins to cat or kitten paws. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 24, 2023.)

In the Right Place: New Immigration Issues

The tide and fyke nets were slack when we arrived at the mouth of Patten Stream on Wednesday, the opening day of the elver season. Here you see one of the nets set to catch these baby American eels (Anguilla rostrata). Fyke (usually locally pronounced “fick”) nets are thin-meshed funnels with a trap and capture-container at the end; the name evolved from the old Dutch word “fuik,” meaning “fish trap.”

At this stage in their lives, the elvers also are known as glass eels because they’re transparent except for their eyes and backbone:

Leighton Archive Image

Maine reportedly is the only state with a significant eel fishery.  In fact, on a per-pound basis, elvers are Maine’s most valuable fish (yes, eels are fish), and they’re the State’s second most valuable annual fishing harvest (after lobsters, which are not fish).

The elver harvest here in 2022 reportedly was worth more than $20.1 million and their price per pound reached $2,131.00 then. They’re ultimately sold mostly to importers in Asia, who receive them live in chilled, air-shipped containers. They’re then raised to maturity and resold for sushi and other delicacies.

These elvers are thought to be migrating here from their parents’ breeding grounds in and around the Sargasso Sea, which encompasses the Bermuda Islands. It’s also thought that these babies are seeking the same freshwater streams and ponds in which their parents matured. But it’s hard to find out what is really happening in eel migrations.

At some time after maturity (usually years), many of these eels will migrate from here back to their species’ breeding grounds and die there after breeding. Thus, they are “catadromous” fish; that is, they have life cycles in both salt and fresh waters.

The 2023 elver season will end here no later than June 7, but that date could be foreshortened by Maine’s diligent wildlife regulators, if they perceive a preservation need. (Primary images taken in Surry, Maine, on March 22, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Come Hither Looks

We’re seemingly in the midst of the big spring meltdown. Most of the snow is out of the woods now and it’s time for the ice to head for the exits in the marsh ponds. These ponds usually are the last to go, often being penetrated first where feeder streams enter them, while their surfaces melt from the bottom layer up.

The ponds are exhibiting an inviting patina of snow ice on top now, as you see here in images taken yesterday.

Do not be fooled by this come-hither look and try to walk on them. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 22, 2023.)

In the Right Place: Our Mud Season

Early spring weather creates beauty in our fields, woods, and streams. But, it has the opposite effect on many of our dirt and gravel lanes and driveways.

The cycles of freezing-thawing-raining-snowing-icing-thawing, coupled with vehicular traffic, create potholes, ruts, and muddy mounds that need to be filled-in and leveled.

(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on March 18 [dumping] and 21 [grading/leveling], 2023.)