New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

The temp dropped to two, time for venison stew.

Tuesday 01/17/2006

Talk about a roller coaster winter. Last Friday as I headed down to Salem to work the Rockingham Hunting and Fishing Expo I left winter here in Epsom with snow covered fields and drove south just 5 miles to Allenstown to find spring. The fields were bare of snow south of there. By Saturday afternoon spring had melted it's way north to here and beyond to the north. But I woke Sunday to find winter, and 3 inches of snow on a one inch thick icy crust, back in town.

Then the thermometer liquid dove towards the bottom of the vial all day Sunday as the temperature plunged from a balmy 17 degrees in the morning to 8 degrees by evening. The Suncook River looked like it was into a real spring thaw on Saturday into Sunday. By Monday the river was marching sheets of ice right at me again all morning. When I sat to have lunch mid day Monday I watched them march by. Then when I glanced out about 2:00PM the ice now covered the river in a winter-like fashion. Winter had arrived here in a mere two hours.

Today I headed south to Nashua to finish the winter waterfowl survey I started there a couple weeks ago but didn't finish due to traffic and the loss of daylight. It is a dues paying day to fight the traffic to count the ducks and geese, but things are always interesting even in the city.

There were a couple of observations worth note. When I swung across the river from Nashua to drive up the east side of the Merrimack River on route 3-A to check a couple spots I happened to drive by a farm in Hudson just below the Litchfield line. A farm that I remember as a young man as I worked in 1965 and 1966 on the Colby Farm in Litchfield. The nearly black colored fertile soil from a beautiful field had been piled higher than the row of new houses What a shame. Certainly some of the most fertile soil in the state is being replaced with a row of houses. I can't believe how shot-sighted we humans can be to let this happen.

Further east as I was in Derry I serendipitously spotted a flock of mallards flying overhead. I counted 18. I sped up to keep sight of them luckily hitting three green lights in a row before they gained on me. Just as I lost sight of them I saw them cup their wings to land. Well I found a whole new spot in a little pond in the Hoodcroft Condo Park. A little pond full of ducks. Nearly 200. But this little pond, that was free of ice today, just happened to be one that I walked by on my way to catch a ride after school my freshman year at Pinkerton. I walked each afternoon with Rick Hamlett to the place his mother worked to get our ride home. But in 1964, this pond was in a big field and always froze solid. It was on this pond that Rick and I could lay down on the crystal clear ice and watch crayfish roam the bottom. I learned the winter habits of crayfish by studying them there. I learned that crayfish are very active under the ice in frigid waters. So it was a pond I once knew and now know it for a whole other reason. Another full circle in my life.

New Hampshire Midwinter Coastal Waterfowl Survey