Spring's gains and losses #phenology

[UPDATE: we tardily wish Happy Birthday! 🎂🎂🎂 to Minnesota's own Robert Zimmerman! 👏👏]

Between being retired and following the COVID-19 safety measures, we've not been driving as much as in former years. That might  account for our lack of turtle sightings this year. Or, perhaps the turtles egg-laying has been delayed? Anyway, we've missed the brief encounters this Spring that we've enjoyed most years by this time.

painted turtle crossing gravel road

Photo by J. Harrington

Hoary puccoon has started to come into flower. Several online sources mention Native American uses of this plant, but I've found no mention of it in Mary Siisip Geniusz Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask | Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings.

hoary puccoon beginning to bloom

Photo by J. Harrington

The pear tree blossoms' petals, like last Winter's snowflakes, have been lost to seasonal changes. The breezes of this past week disbursed them into the taller and still growing grass stems. In fact, about all the trees around the neighborhood have reached a stage of full leafout. There are few, if any, open spaces left in the treeline, but many trees like crab apples are still in flower. If wildflowers and trees were in bloom year round, would we then come to take their beauty for granted?

Without much expectation of success, this morning I once again set traps for pocket gophers. There are fresh mounds in several widely separated locations on the back slope. If I could train gophers to eat buckthorn roots, I'd consider it a fair trade, but the gophers prefer the more open country of our fields where there are no buckthorns. As far as I know, gophers serve a very limited ecological role and have destroyed numerous fruit trees we've planted plus, they seem responsible for the disappearance of several prairie wildflowers we've planted, such as pasque flowers. Although the local deer have killed half of our chokeberry bushes, at least deer offer occasional aesthetic pleasures. Pocket gophers are ugly and out of sight underground most of the time.

Ellen Bass

GOPHERS

I’ve tried to kill the gophers. On stained

knees, up to my elbows in their earthen

tunnels, setting the green toothed trap, my human

scent masked with anise oil, then sweetened

with leaves of the sweet potato vine my neighbor maintains

they can’t resist, a rodent version of caviar and champagne.

But the dead must do some arcane

transmission of wisdom to the living. They’ve eaten

every fleck of leaf, sprung each trap with cool disdain.

They’re marvels, miniature Charlemagnes. Then

suddenly, I hear it—like a tiny microphone’s hidden

under the dirt. You couldn’t mistake this blazon

for anything else, like Louis Armstrong singing

It’s a Wonderful World. But when

the little fists of four leaf clover begin

to tremble, I’m confused not to feel the thrill of the hunt, the cocaine

rush in my veins. I pick up the shovel—I’ve slain

them like this—a hose down the hole, then bash their brains,

but my will wanes. It seems pointless to kill one denizen

when there must be dozens taking the A-train,

just trying to get to Sugar Hill. Listen.

It’s not an Elizabeth Bishop fish thing.

It’s not Galway’s bear or Stafford’s deer on the mountain,

not Kunitz’s whale or Donald Hall’s paean,

scratching the jowls of a cooked pig. I look into the grainy

hole the gopher’s dug with his skinny

incisors, this corridor between

worlds, and it’s the sound that stops me. That unseen

small tearing of the roots on such a serene

morning. I’m watching the grass shiver. I’m leaning

over, straining to hear it again.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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