New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Feels like fall is blowing in today.
Tuesday 09/27/2005
Fall is late. It looks like it is a couple weeks late to me. Many red maples have yet to turn crimson orange and red, even along the wetlands. No frost yet and even hardly any real cool temperatures save for Sunday morning when my thermometer read 37 degrees as I headed off for a day-long workshop in Bear Brook State Park. We have been running ten to twenty degrees above "normal" for this time of year. Perhaps we are making up a bit for the too cool spring.
I lead two groups of folks in canoes, a morning session and an afternoon session, out to check the duck nesting boxes I usually check each winter on the ice. The UNH Cooperative Extension folks had a field day to reward their Community Forest and Tree Stewards for their services to the various communities they volunteer in. One lady had served for nearly two decades since the program was launched. These are the faces that move a community in the environmentally friendly direction. Many of the Stewards have been instrumental in getting their town to protect large tracts of land through bonds and local initiatives. A town is lucky to have these folks as community members.
Our first stop was to check the dozen or so boxes at Hayes Marsh. The group of close to twenty unloaded the canoes from the trailer and followed me as I moved the hundred yards through the woods trail to the marsh edge. Ah! There was no water in the marsh. In more than twenty five years of monitoring this marsh I have never seen the water this low.
Needless to say the canoes were loaded back on the trailer and we hit another nearby marsh. I went to the dam at days end to check the dam constructed by Fish and Game in the 60's to create this marsh. I figured some vandals had pulled the sluice boards as occasionally happens. The boards were in, but a lack of beaver activity had caused the marsh to drain since water was seeping through the cracks between the planks. The beavers usually stop these leaks but had not and the lack of rain the last month and a half was not enough to keep the pond full.
The Suncook River outside my home office window this morning has been transformed back to a "summer look". Gone are the orange leaves of a week ago as they were likely striped by the heavy rain of last night. The vestiges of the fall look are all gone. Still the slanted morning sun, that brings out the brilliance of the green trees, has left the river a shadowy gray color with a bright blue strip down the middle where the strong gusts of wind stir the surface. It is a stirred scene this morning with the trees dancing in the wind above the glittering water.
