New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Another 100-year flood on the Suncook River and my crocuses are blooming
Thursday 03/18/2010
Ah, another sure sign of spring. My crocuses began blooming Tuesday. Snow has vanished except for a tiny pile left from plowing on my front lawn. Last year this pile melted away on the afternoon of April 15th. We are a month ahead of last year at this point. Spring seems to be running at least three weeks early. In my hikes into Bear Brook Sate Park this week on some sunny afternoons the smell of warm earth leaps up from below my feet filling the air with the smell of pine needles and sweet earth. I have taken a couple minutes here and there to sprawl on the warm earth and soak it in like a bath. My dog quickly lays nearby on her back wriggling to do the same. We are kindered spirits, she and I. Oh to take in all that this spring has to offer. Sights, sounds and smell come flooding into my sense.
Speaking of floods, by Monday I awoke to another 100-year flood out my window. Or very close to it. The Friends of the Suncook River web site (http://www.friendsofsuncookriver.org/) has the North Chichester river gauge posted on it. I followed the rise and now the fall of the river with one eye cast out past my deck and another on the gauge report. Normal flow for this time of year is 275 cubic feet per second, csf, but the Suncook ran close to 6,000 cfs by Monday. If not another 100-year flood event then pretty close to it. Lest we forget the 2007 flood was a 500-year event. The last taking place this month in 1936, not quite 500 years ago.
How quickly the fields are greening up. I expect to see numbers of deer in them any day now. And we are just days from hearing peepers and our annual salamander event. Hundreds and hundreds of robins were pouring through in the pouring rain over the weekend. I sat in my living room chair listening to the steady rain and wind out my window and watched windrows of robins bounce and flow from the south in the field across from my house. The steady pace of their low ground hugging migration took them on to the lawn of my neighbor directly across from me then on to my lawn and then northward into my neighbors field to the north of me. Some stopped to dine on the still bright red barberry bush in my front yard. Their plump red breasts looked more like oranges hanging from the shrub as they drifted by and dined along the way. This went on for much of the day Saturday and Sunday. I bore witness to a mass migration of robins right from the comfort of a warm cushy chair. The rain and wind seemed to matter not to them. They were on a mission.
And so it will be for the next several weeks as flock after flock of birds and critter after critter move to retake the land from winter's grasp. All nudged on by the ever rising sun. Life refills the land and waters.