Spring: better late than never #phenology

We saw the first dragonfly of the year today. To say that made us happy would be an understatement. They’re fun to watch and they eat mosquitoes. What more could one ask, that they also taste good? Then who would eat the mosquitoes? We were disappointed that there are still no bees evident on the pear tree blossoms but realize we were only watching for a few minutes and the breeze may have been strong enough, often enough, to deter flights to the tree. Our disappointment about the (lack of) bees was tempered when we noticed violet blossoms in the patch of our property near where the driveway meets the township road.

There’s been a handful of rose-breasted grosbeaks at the feeders, but no scarlet tanagers yet. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and our hopes dampened. We’re not sure what the delayed arrival of spring-like weather has done to songbird migration.

male rose-breasted grosbeak eying feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

We do feel fortunate that today was cool enough that we didn’t get overheated doing yard work and warm enough that we didn’t get chilled doing that same yard work. If the weather cooperates, the north side foundation will get blasted with ant spray early Wednesday. Last summer we tried ant traps and they didn’t seem to accomplish much. This year we’re going for a more direct approach.

In preparation for ant spraying, most of the leaves have been cleared from the foundation wall on the north side. We hadn’t calculated the wind/breeze direction as we were raking and forking the leaves, so several times some of the forkfuls we were dumping into the garden cart blew back right at us because we were downwind of the cart. We remember the song lyrics about “you don’t spit into the wind,’ but never transferred the principle to leaf cleanup.

Once again we’re experiencing the pains of adjusting from a sedentary winter that extends into and greatly shortens spring to a quite active early (pre-Memorial Day) summer phase without a hoped for transitional period of what would be four or five weeks of a normal spring. Then again, we’re grateful that we’ve held together well enough so far that we can even try to accomplish our usual spring cleanup, although we have to pace ourselves now more than we used to.

Yard Work

By Don Thompson

My leaf blower lifted the blackbird—

wings still spread, weightless,

floating on the loud, electric wind

almost as if it were alive.

Three or four times it flew,

but fell again, sideslipped down

like a kite with no string,

so I gave up. . . I had work to do,

and when the dust I raised

had settled in that other world

under the rose bushes, the ants

came back to finish theirs.

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