New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
A cool kick off to the AM.
Monday 08/23/2004
Well, this morning felt like it should for a late August morning. It was only 47 degrees in Epsom about 7:00Am. A low fog hung over the Suncook River as it will well into the fall.
Of coarse this weekend's deluge of rain has muddied up the river and nearly everything else. I read that Concord, NH registered the most rain in a 24 hour period ever on Saturday, 1.7 inches. When I got back from camp in Maine Sunday night and checked my rain gauge it registered just over 2 inches.
At camp on Saturday the rain came down so hard that it washed out a culvert marooning us until Sunday when several of us pitched in to replace the washout. Luckily the neighboring camp owner's son owns a construction business and brought in the equipment and material for a quick fix. What normally is just a dry ditch this time of year, and just a step-over trickle the rest of the year, turned into a chocolate brown 10 foot wide stream at one point on Saturday.
The river flowing into Medomac Lake on Sunday was the same color and quickly brought the lake level up nearly two feet by mid day Sunday. My son-in-law and I used a break in the rain on Saturday morning to get out on the lake and catch nearly a dozen large mouth bass and a couple pickerel. Despite a cloudless and warming sky on Sunday my daughter Amy and I couldn't coax a bite from the fish.
I did take time Sunday afternoon to relax in my hammock and study the massive red oak tree that dominates the shore in front of our camp. It was filled with birds. Sunday morning there was a procession of swallows at high altitude migrating across the lake. Although I expected to see a monarch butterfly dance across the lake at the same time, and in the same direction, I didn't see any. Generally this week will see numbers of them filtering south and they are very apparent if you are on water. In fact a few years ago I was some distance out of Portsmouth Harbor and they were filtering by all day across the Gulf of Maine. Wildlife continues to trickle out of New Hampshire this week.
