New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

The tide keeps coming in and muted colors hang on.

Monday 10/24/2005

Another week of rain has kept the brooks and rivers swollen at a low to medium flood stage. And we are less than a day from getting another potential deluge from hurricane Wilma. We finally did have a hard frost. In fact we had two in a row Wednesday and Thursday nights. However we still are hanging on to more of a summer look with lush green fields, lawns and even plenty of trees are hanging on to their green leaves. Perhaps this will do the trees well for a growing season since the spring was so cold and cloudy that the leaves were two weeks late in coming on.

I did get out some over the weekend. The long period of the moose check station had me hemmed in at the Fish and Game Region 3 office in Durham for seven days straight. Even the evenings were full of other work preparing for the upcoming trapping and hunting seasons that I didn't even get out into the woods to hunt or walk for a single evening. Although I only saw seven moose in Durham from Saturday to the next Friday it is a long week. This last weekend my replacement saw four more moose at Region 3. This brings the total to eleven for the 9-day season. The average at the Region 3 station is 23 a year. I understand that the overall success was about the same at around 70 percent as most of the other stations had moose coming in all week. Usually the first three days produces the bulk of the moose for the
season. Not so this year. A week of rain and fowl weather set the kill back. But the moose hunters hung in there and made up for the slow start. Not something I expected.

I Helped my friend Jean get his boat off his mooring in the back channel at Portsmouth Harbor early Saturday morning. It's a pretty good sized boat to get on to a trailer for winter storage at his house. It was nice to get on
the ocean one last time even if it was just a short trip to the boat landing. Hardly another craft moving despite a sunny mild morning. It didn't even look much like fall down there. But what a transition has happened with
the moorings bobbing without their craft attached and no constant sounds of boat motors.

Not much happening on the wildlife front. Again setting in an office for a week kind of limits the possibilities for observations save for the trickle of dead moose. I had my crow friends for much of the week. Although
something happened early in the week to change things. During the opening weekend there were a half dozen or more crows around the building that scoffed up the occasional offerings I provided out back. But they all disappeared on Wednesday and only one was present on Thursday and Friday. Another food source? Perhaps a predator, such as an owl, moved in here? Something changed the crow behavior here overnight. The rainy nights have
had pretty much barren roads as far as frogs go. They must be in hibernation as they usually are by now. I was wondering with the lack of a frost and plenty of insects still available if they might stay out to stretch their
season. Not so. Old sol sent them to bed on time. They have a curfew set by the amount of sunshine. And the sun has been pretty much obscured for the last month except for a day here and there. Even the ducks seem to have gone
and I have yet to see a high V-formation of migrating geese. Perhaps they have gone but were above the clouds. But I should have heard them. I usually hear the big migration through the night. There is still lots of colored
trees although the long cloudy period has taken the beauty and hidden it this fall.