I found a great new location for wildflowers in a nearby town. There were large patches of yellow Wood Poppy, Trilliums of different species, Wood Anemone, Spring Beauty.

Spring is blooming - wildflowers and garden flowers as well. Here’s a complementary color scheme for a favorite garden flower:

I had a great day outside in the yard, getting wet in the drizzle, taking in all the flowers. Bluebells blooming, trillium, grape hyacinth, violets, an explosion of flowers.

My bloodroot finally came up last week. The first few flowers were the usual eight petal white type. Then this weekend another pair blossomed and they were double or triple the usual number of petals.

A welcome surprise. Lots of wildflowers are coming up now - trout lily, dutchmans’s breetches, trillum - I just have to wait for the rain to stop to get out again.

The first butterflies of the season aren’t freshly emerged from the chrysalis, they are about a year old. Early spring butterflies in the northeast - Mourning Cloaks, Eastern Commas, Milbert’s Tortoiseshells, and Compton’s Tortoiseshells - were caterpillars in the summer of 2007. They emerged as adults during midsummer last year, and spent the winter hidden in cracks in tree bark, stone walls and other spots. The spring adults aren’t as pretty as they were the previous summer, but they have character. Here’s a view of the dusky underwing of a Mourning Cloak:

Mourning Cloaks are strong but leisurely in flight. They have a way or circling around and perching prominently in a sunny spot for a moment, and then taking off again for another circuit around. Sometimes they perch on the ground, sometimes on a branch high in a tree.

The season is changing, but now spring is more an expectation than an event. The redwings have been back for a month, I saw my first butterfly of the season last week (an Eastern Comma), my crocuses are up, but… the green thing isn’t happening yet. You can hear spring in the birds voices, but all I see is winter brown and spring mud. This sort of green scene is still a month off:

I’ve put up a new project gallery at my web site:

Water

It’s a collection of water images, all from this winter, many from Kiln Brook. Stop by and tell me what you think!

Another brook image, but one of a very different character than the others. This is a long exposure of a small patch of bubbles, spinning around in an eddy in the stream. There were highlights on one side from late afternoon sunshine and the blue sky gave the water its hue:

The exposure was 1.6 seconds. Even though the bubbles were turning slowly, the highlights have a lot of rotation travel.

I’ve been whetting my appetite for spring with a book about bugs: Crickets and Katydids, Concerts and Solos by Vincent Dethier. It’s a memoir of a summer job that the author had, a very unusual one. As a student in the 1930s, he was hired to catch crickets and katydids so that a professor could record their songs.

It’s an idyllic story. Dethier learns to find the different species by season, by different habitats, but most of all by listening. Songs are how these insects - crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids - advertise themselves to mates. Each song must be different, so a female can find a male of the right species. So he spends a full growing season, from May to September or so, at the feet of the White Mountains in New Hampshire listening to bugs. Birding by ear is a familiar term to many of us - this way of identifying and finding insects was new to me.

Dethier put the insects in cages, males and females together, and fed them with wild vegetation and lettuce from a Franklin N.H. grocery. His employer, a retired Harvard physics professor, recorded the songs using equipment he designed himself. The author later became a distinguished entomologist and biologist.

The thing I found most attractive about this story was the great love and attention the author brings to being in nature, the glory of the sights and the sounds of it. He brings a rapt interest to being outside and observing the web of interrelationships in nature that most of us reserve for appreciating art in a museum, or for reading an essay or novel. It’s an aesthetic experience: listening to the music of massed choirs of tree crickets in late season. Dethier invites us to take all this in. The biology is almost incidental.

I can’t stay away, I’m entranced with the water at this place. Spring is just beginning, it’s still quite cold, but I can hear a change in the bird’s songs, and the brooks is rushing with the spring rains and snow melt.

Unfortunately I’ve spent way too much time lately trying to recover from hard drive problems. I lost my main backup drive, but haven’t lost any source data (yet!) but most of my images files have been offline and unavailable while I tinkered with the hardware. Wish me luck!

Another image from the brook - there’s something about flowing water I find soothing and attractive.

This was a 15 second exposure taken with a polarizer as light was fading. I used the polarizer to lengthen the exposure - probably it was unnecessary with the light this dim.

The last few days I’ve been at Kiln Brook, looking for snaky flows of water through the rocks. Every day is different - the light is different, the snow melted gradually and ice formed in the flows, then melted completely. Now it’s cold again - 20 F, headed for 5 F overnight). More ice tomorrow!

The water tells a story as it flows from one part of the frame to another. This was a 1 second exposure done with a polarizer.