New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff
Is it spring? Or is it still winter? I'm confused here.
Friday 03/29/2013
Today brings a bright sunny day with temperatures maybe hitting close to 50. I have been amazed the last couple of weeks of the constant mixing of winter one day, spring(sort of) the next, then back to winter.
One thing is for sure I am living in one of the most wintry spots of NH. A little over a week ago I drove to Littleton to give a lecture on Climate Change Impacts to NH Fish and Wildlife. I was deep with snow here in Epsom. To my surprise by the time I got to Tilton up Rt 93 there was far less snow. And beyond belief and yet further north of Franconia Notch there was even less snow. In fact looking off into the forests on either side of the highway much of the land in the woods was snowless or nearly so. Earlier that week I had spotted a flock of robins bobbing as a line of soldiers across some bare spotted lawns in Pembroke. Now I have seen robins pretty much all winter in Concord. They were normally clustered in flocks and were feeding on the crab apple tree fruits. But these robins looked far more like migrants. That was on a Monday. The very next day we got another foot of snow here in Epsom. And it was another coastal storm with the north country spared of snow once again. So the whole state seems to have been flipped on its head this winter.
The fields around here are still mostly snow covered even today, though the last couple of day some strips or spots of bare earth are sowing again. This is where we were some three weeks ago as far as spring conditions. I have yet to hear a red winged blackbird at my house. And I have had my parabolic listen device out to glean the air of a call. I did see a dead woodchuck on rt 28 in Epsom three days ago. But they are driven to breed right now in order to bare young at the right time.
And how cold it has been. We have been running ten degrees below average with plenty of cloudy days to cap the sun's, now high, efforts to diminish the snow. Oh for a whiff of spring!
