Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 308
April felt more like March with winds almost every day and snow mixed in several mornings, not much but just enough to let you know spring wasn’t here yet. This week my daffodils started popping out all around Eight Acre Wood. Karen planted them all through the woods around the house so no matter which window you looked out you would see some in bloom and we have over forty windows. The yellow primrose that I got at the Old Forge Historical all popped out this week and they keep spreading so I never know where I might find one in the next year. I do have some fancy ones that come out later and they are deer resistant.
As I lay in bed the other morning, I heard munching just outside the windows and doe deer’s head popped up from one of my flower beds. I don’t know what she was munching on but her fawn from last year was following her down my garden picking on my non deer resistant plants. I soon shooed them off but I’m sure they came back to the lunch cart in the dark. I sprayed my deer mixture, but with all the rain you would have to spray every day.
One sunny day my hepatica bloomed, but folded up during the colder days. The spring beauties did about the same thing, and they were in bloom everywhere along the path to the pond. The dogtooth lily leaves are up everywhere, and I think that’s what I see the deer munching on in the front yard. Something had eaten some of the little wildflowers as all I saw was stems left behind. I did get a snowshoe hare on my trail camera and a raccoon, so I think I caught the culprit. I had put out some apple pieces that the turkeys were gobbling up, but I think the hare found them as a nice snack.
Just when you think you have banded every bird around the feeders another flight comes in the next day. One day I had over sixty Purple Finch and put bands on forty-nine of them, mostly males. Then I would look at twenty or more under feeders and none of them had a band. I did get a couple nice returns from Purple Finch which I had never got before, and I’ve banded over five hundred over the years. One from two years ago and one that I banded on the same day just a year ago, so I guess he is right on schedule. This would be the time that Karen and I spent on Sanibel Island, but it’s been three years now with Covid and the hurricane damage that we haven’t been there, and I may have missed these birds while I was there but I’m not missing them now.
I put in the piece by Brooks Wade from Lake Jocassee last week and he has kept up his sightings. He had a Loon fall out on 4/6. He was out early on the lake before sunrise going to a spot where he had seen Loons come down in the past and nothing that morning. As he was coming back in, he went over by the dam and there were over four hundred loons all over the water and as he looked around all he could see there were more Loons over a thousand, more Loons than he had ever seen on the lake. The next morning, he had tours with local kids on four pontoon boats and the Loons were all over the water right in the bay by the landing and as far as the eye could see Loons were hooting and fishing. It was a great tour for him and something these kids will probably never see again. A great experience with nature up close and I’m sure the cell phones were out taking photos.
With some of this warmer weather my wood frogs snuck into the little vernal pond behind the house and laid their eggs. There was a fly hatch over the pond last night even with the cold temperatures and the wind whipping. The trout were jumping and I caught and released one. During the release, my little camera managed to slip into the pond for a swim. I retrieved it quickly and dried it out and luckily it still takes pictures, even one of the trout before it went swimming.
Crown Point Banding begins this weekend for two weeks in its fiftieth year there, but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Trout on the Line
