Fauna

Ah, Spring! What a relief when it gets here, even if the weather does sometimes disappoint.

It's been too cool here at night to do our second frog survey--the temp has to be at least 55--or if we have had a rare night that warm, it has (of course) fallen on a night when we weren't home. When the weather is warm enough, we do still hear the frogs. As for the later-calling frogs, I have yet to hear a green frog (the kind that sounds like a loose banjo string), but I have heard the Eastern gray tree frog. A couple of years ago, during a downpour, we had the pleasure of seeing one of these little guys on our glass door, clinging with his (or her) suction-cup feet. These frogs change color, and this one was the bright green one associates with red-eyes. She (or he) was gorgeous.

I haven't been able to get a photo of the growing baby cranes, but they are taking on a distinctly more crane-like appearance, their legs and necks noticeably elongating. I haven't seen them for three or four days, but I'm sure they are now losing or have lost their downy appearance.

The birds have been busy. We have lots of bluebird boxes around the place, but they're not always occupied by bluebirds. I've seen tree swallows, for example, battling it out both with other tree swallows and with bluebirds for occupancy. At nesting time there's a lot of activity around here and a constant "white noise" of bird calls--most of which, alas, I can't identify (something to work on). We also have had trouble with barn swallows trying to nest in our pole barn, so we have to be careful not to leave the doors open.

This past winter we didn't see the goldfinches that usually flock to our thistle-seed feeder, but they're everywhere now. It's always lovely to see the brilliant yellow of the males. Yesterday one of them was so intent on luring a female that I got quite close before he noticed me. From afar he looked like a large, misshapen dandelion (of which we have zillions in our "lawn").

I put out the hummingbird feeders a week or two ago, one on the front porch and one on the balcony, and both have had visitors. I always marvel at photos in catalogues of several hummingbirds at a single feeder. In our experience, if you see two at a feeder amicably sucking up nectar together, they are probably a pair. We've seen some pretty impressive air battles as these tiny but very territorial birds "encourage" interlopers to leave.

Waterfowl we've seen on the lake, mostly on their migratory journey, have been too numerous to list here, but one highlight was seeing a great egret on the far shore of the lake one day.

We've got a couple of great horned owls that like to sit at dusk on the dead branch of a tree about halfway between the edge of our back lawn and the lake shore. I'd heard their hooting earlier this spring, but hadn't seen one until two nights ago. They are said to be year-round residents, but I don't remember seeing them this past winter. When we first bought our property, but before we had the house built, we'd see owl pellets and scatterings of tiny bones under the oak tree. Since we moved in, the owls have kept their distance and don't often seem to roost in the oak tree. But I did see what I think was a large owl pellet in our driveway. I had seen it for a day or two, but wasn't sure what it was. It could have been a giant turd for all I knew. Yesterday I gingerly prodded it with the toe of my shoe and saw what looked to be a couple of small bones, but I was too revolted and unsure of what it was to continue any investigation. Urk.

Here's a mystery. One night last week I was lying awake, hearing the night sounds from my slightly opened window, when an utterly hair-raising scream made my hair stand on end. At first I thought it was a human scream and thought someone was being attacked, possibly murdered--it was that horrifying. A minute later, another scream. This went on, and I realized that the sound was getting farther away. I said to my now-awake spouse, "What the hell kind of bird was that?" He didn't know but agreed with me that it was blood-curdling. We both thought it had to be a night bird of some sort, given the pattern of gradual moving away, we thought through flight. I talked to my daughter about it and she Googled around while we were on the phone, trying to find some info. She said that the barn (or was it barred) owl is said to have a range of sounds from something like a hiss to a human-like scream. Ah, I thought.

But I've been listening to owl sounds here and there on the web, and none of them sound at all like what I heard. I brought up the subject while talking to my daughter yesterday, and she said, "Well, this web site said it was human-like, and I don't know what else it could be. [pause] Unless it was a panther ... they're said to have a human-like scream." She reminded me of the Little House books and Laura describing the hair-raising panther screams.

Auuggh! All I can say is I sure hope I heard some unidentified bird out there. But I keep thinking of the rumors of panthers a couple of year back ... A bobcat, maybe? Whatever it was, I hope it's gone for good.

Meanwhile, the deer haven't seemed quite so numerous now that our upper garden is fenced in. It interrupts one of their trails, so I'm wondering if they've abandoned that particular track in favor of one farther west.

And I've seen some Eastern swallowtail butterflies, plus some others I didn't get close enough to identify.

Welcoming back in the spring the many forms of life (and this is only a partial list, of course) that migrated to warmer climes last fall or hid away all winter is something we eagerly anticipate each year. The cycle of life continues, and it is a wonderful thing to behold.