I wrote the following last night.  Today, temperatures jumped into the 70s–77 as I write this at 6 PM.  The forecast is for highs in the 70s and 80s for the next three days.  So much for stretching out the spring.

Beech-maple forest in early spring, Pavilion Township. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

A stretch of chilly weather, especially some cool nights below freezing, has kept spring from racing ahead the way it sometimes does.  This is good; summer is a fine time, but there are lots of things to experience in spring and it’s more fun to have them spread out rather than all happen in a week.

When I wrote my last post, no frogs had been calling as yet, but soon after, the afternoon of 17 March, wood frogs were calling in the small kettles such as the one shown in the preceding post.

Finding another sound to match any animal’s voice is difficult.  But saying that wood frog calls sound like the feeding chuckle of ducks is not a bad comparison. The frog calls are a little louder, I think, and each one sounds quite fervent, unlike the kind of absent-minded noodling of a bunch of dabbling ducks. But the comparison is a pretty good way to give other people an idea of what wood frogs sound like.

I have heard no chorus frogs or spring peepers yet.  We usually think of these two as the earliest frogs here in eastern North America, but some years wood frogs have been earlier in my experience.  I’m not sure, though, that–for whatever reason–peepers and chorus frogs aren’t rarer than they used to be.

Another animal that I believe was decidedly less common the past few months than in preceding years is the white-footed mouse.  I don’t go out and census mice in the woods; I base this impression on how many mice I trap each winter in the house.  The house here in Oshtemo Township is in oak forest. Beginning when the nights start to get cold, the mice start to find ways to get inside.  I trap them with ordinary mouse traps baited with a little peanut butter with a couple of sunflower seeds stuck in the peanut butter or inserted elsewhere on the trigger of the trap.  Most winters I trap a couple of dozen white-footed mice.  This winter I caught a couple of mice early on and then no more through most of November, December, January, and February.  I also set traps in my house in the southeast part of Kalamazoo County, in beech-maple forest.  Most years I catch several mice through the winter, but this past winter only a couple.

I don’t know what may have happened to the mice this winter and I don’t know whether it’s temporary or a permanent decline.  Next fall and winter may give me a clue.

Floerkea proserpinacoides, False Mermaid Weed, Big Island Woods, March 30, 2010. Photograph by Richard Brewer.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.  It’s early spring.  The wood frogs are calling.  In the beech-maple forest, harbinger of spring, our earliest spring wild flower is finishing up (a blog called Kalamazoo Seasons has a nice photo of the flower). The very first spring beauty flowers have opened. Wild leek is up.

And the little annual Floerkea proserpinacoides with its pale-green narrow leaflets is spread profusely over the ground in the few woodlots where it occurs, but is not quite in bloom yet.  This odd mesic forest specialist deserves a better vernacular name than the obscure, bookish “false mermaid weed.”  Maybe we need a contest for a new, better-fitting name for it.

Anyway it’s spring and will be for a good month yet, maybe longer.  Let’s enjoy it.

Leaves of wild leek, March 2010, Pavilion Township. Photograph by Richard Brewer.