New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Spring life is flooding in.
Tuesday 03/29/2005
The Suncook River has reached a low flood stage after over 24 hours of rain. The meadow down below has started to flood but only the edges of the corn field have been inundated. I have seen numerous years over the last 25 springs that the field was completely under water. In fact I have taken a canoe from just below the banking by my house and canoed the quarter mile to the fields end. Just moments ago three drake wood ducks came bobby down the river and were quickly swept around the bend by the growing current.My first wood ducks of the year. There have been years when two dozen wood ducks have briefly rested along the ice shelf of the backwater just as the river opens in the spring. I usually spot a hooded merganser or two by first ice out as well. I have missed them this year.
There will literally be a flood of waterfowl moving through the next few days. Ducks and more ducks will be skipping from open puddle to open puddle as they seem to push winter away and drag spring over the land like a giant quilt. This happens very quickly. In less than a week. We are well into it today.Ring-necked ducks are usually only spotted around here these few days each year.
We enjoyed Easter at my sisters in Bedford as usual. What was unusual was the heaps of snow even there.The Easter egg hunt was for just the little ones this year as the deep snow precluded my sister from hiding eggs for us bigger kids. What a joy to watch my little grand daughter Katie catch-on and start collecting eggs as the other little kids raced around spilling eggs from their baskets. There have been few years in the last 25 that snow was as deep and pervasive down there foe Easter.
I did get a call from Rick Hamlett late afternoon yesterday. He was working an hour or so south of Nashua. He was hearing his first spring peeper at that very moment and took the time to share it with me.
Office work and torrential rain has kept me out of the woods the last couple of days (older and wiser). But I did manage to grab a road killed deer a couple of days ago and I took a look at her femur bone marrow fat content. She was a yearling deer. The bone marrow was reddish and somewhat limp but still had a solidness to it and enough whitish color when squished between my fingers to indicate that she was in pretty good condition for this late in the winter. Time after time I have folks tell me "I saw 5, 6 10 (or whatever number) deer and they 'looked' healthy to me". I my experience you can only tell two things while looking at a deer in winter about its health. It is alive. It is dead. Not much else! But I can tell you pretty much the health of a deer when I look at its bone marrow. So the next several weeks NH Fish and Game biologists, like me, will be looking for dead deer in deer yards, or whenever possible a road kill, and will be determining the health of that deer by a measurable method.
