By Gary Lee
Maybe spring has finally arrived…let’s hope so! A little rain will sure perk things up and push out those leaves.
I’ve heard the smelt are running in the local streams, so much so that area stores have run out of smelt nets.
Other than taking their eggs and some adults for stocking by permit in other lakes, I’ve never been much of a chaser of smelt.
Some of them took and others didn’t.
I know they have been trying to get a population for forage for the laketrout in Seventh Lake for few years now.
I don’t know how successful that has been.
They have been taking eggs from Black Bear Mountain Brook to establish lake spawning smelt in Seventh, rather than have them run up the brooks where the mallard ducks eat most of the eggs.
Yesterday and today (5/2 & 3) my wildflowers stuck their little heads up.
My colts foot, trout lily and little yellow violets are even blooming.
My daphne bushes are all in full bloom, so there will be lots of red berries decorating their branches all summer.
This is a neat little bush that I first got along Route 28 near the Tuttle Road.
Even with all the highway construction in that area some of these bushes continue to grow there.
They are fairly deer resistant, though they get nibbled on a little during a bad winter.
The limber braches hide under the snow for the most part and pop back up come spring covered with pretty little purple flowers.
Got in some of my loon platforms this week.
On one lake they followed me right out to the spot, sometimes splash diving beside the canoe.
I wasn’t more than a couple hundred feet away and both birds were all around the platform.
A pair was calling on the other side of the Limekiln Lake, but they will find their home before the day is over.
When I got back to the boat launch there was a pair of common mergansers feeding less than 100 feet away.
Normally they are a little spooked but this pair climbed up on a big rock there and started preening.
The male is very pretty this time of the year, mostly white with and black to green head.
The males lose their pretty colors soon after breeding and look like the females the rest of the summer.
Once, a lady called me from over on Lake Abanakee and said she had over 100 loons on the water out in front of her house.
I had to get a picture, so I jumped in the truck and drove over with my camera loaded.
When I got to the causeway there were a lot of birds on the water but only one pair of loons, the rest were common mergansers.
I tried to show her in the bird book but she was convinced they were loons. It still made a nice shot with all those pretty males in the group.
On another lake where I put in a platform there were four female bufflehead ducks fishing not far from where I put in the loon platform.
They weren’t spooked easily either. They let me get pretty close before they exploded out of the water and flew to the other side of the lake.
This coming weekend, on Saturday, May 9, is yet another big bird count called Global Big Day.
Cornell’s Team Sapsucker is going to Panama where many of the western hemisphere birds pass through on their way north.
As a fundraising effort for Cornell Lab they are going to try and see and hear as many of these birds as they can in a 24-hour period.
You can contribute to their effort and participate by counting the birds in your area and recording them on E-bird.
With these warmer temperatures the snow piles from winter plowing are fast fading from area yards to be replaced by flowers in the garden.
I still have a big pile on the shaded side of the house that came off the roof, but that should be gone by the time you read this.
There are still 71 inches of snow at the stake on Mt. Mansfield in Vermont.
When there is snow at the stake there is still the possibility of a frost, so don’t be too quick to put in that garden.
The fall bear take was up statewide…but that’s another story. See ya.