I was minding my own business, sitting in my little study, and happened to glance out the window in time to see this dude ambling across the lawn. Naturally my heart began to pound like mad! I was actually on the phone at the time (with a client) but threw it down and went charging to the front door with my iphone. I actually opened the door and stepped out as I wanted to get a good shot for G (diehard bear fan, I knew he would be crushed to miss this) and the bear—a teen, and male, I think, for no good reason—locked eyes with me and froze for a good 30 seconds before turning and loping down the hill. I'm not ashamed to say I was deeply thrilled.
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Last weekend we took our houseguests exploring in the woods behind our house. The air was fresh and clean, the sun was shining, the woodpeckers were tapping out a beat and there were plenty of newts and tadpoles to ogle. It's amazing to think that just a couple hours out of the city you can be an entire world away. (Or at the designer outlets at Woodbury Commons, for that matter.) The last photo, of the snake, was actually taken in our front yard. The first garden snake of the season...
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Now that spring is here, most mornings G and I will head into the woods behind our property where all manner of goings-on have us totally intrigued. Are you as fascinated as I am by the wonders of nature? Ever since I was a small child I have been content to rummage around on the forest floor or at the water's edge, searching for bugs or plants or animal life of any sort. (We have a little cabinet of curios in our cottage where we deposit our most precious finds: a discarded locust's shell; a papery wasp's nest; a boldly-patterned turkey feather; a chunk of a turtle's shell. I'll get G to document these for you sometime.) Anyway, I think I've mentioned the vernal pools before, right? They are small shallow ponds or enormous puddles that form because of the melting snow and heavy rains of early spring, creating marshy areas as seen above. The wonderful thing is that these are breeding grounds for frogs, newts and salamanders!
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Have you heard about the plight of the bats here in the northeast? They’re suffering from something called white-nose fungus, a scourge that has killed more than a million bats since it was first noticed in upstate New York in 2006. The sugary looking smudges of fungus that accumulate on bats' noses and wings seems to thrive in cold, damp hibernation caves. It disturbs the bats’ hibernation sleep, waking them up and sending them out, confused and disoriented, into frigid temperatures. This dangerously depletes their stores of fat and they frequently die of starvation. The fast-spreading disease has already been detected in nine states, and biologists fear it could wipe out certain bat species entirely. Because bats can consume their own weight in insects in a single day, their decimation could have serious consequences. A rise in the number of agricultural pests could mean that farmers will react with more pesticides, which would find their way into the water table.
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