This waterlily pad showed up yesterday. I'm not sure why there's just one... I expect many to come, with flowers in the summer.
Students found this egg on the trail. They all assume it's a robin's egg, but it's actually a bit more pale of a blue. Starling?
This weather -- chilly and alternately pouring rain and drizzle -- is great for watching movies or snuggling up with a book... and apparently for marsh marigolds. This one in my yard opened up today; with the sump pump pumping away, it is nearly submerged!
The first tulip, pasqueflower, some cool mushroom gills, emerging wild ginger,two turtle shells, and Virginia bluebells almost flowering. 
Yesterday was grey and rainy and blustery and, overall, icky. (So much for embracing the weather, whatever it is!) The day ended in over 3 hours of school board meeting, on the way to which I came across this guy. A vole, who was alive but not doing at all well. I couldn't tell why, he had no apparent injuries. He was breathing. But he was just laying there, waiting, I guess, to die. How sad, to make it through the cold winter and then kick it just as spring makes its entrance. Yesterday was cold, but I can't imagine it was cold enough to do in a vole, so I have no idea what ailed him. And I thought about putting him out of his misery but couldn't do it because I wanted him to make a miraculous recovery, or at least make some hawk very happy. 
So much is happening that it's hard to remember it all, and even harder to do more than just list it all! My bloodroot fully opened this morning (but now has closed up like in the drawing above). Also two hepatica plants, which I'm told are pretty sensitive, so yea!
I have a few flowers on my celandine poppies! I got those from a friend a few years ago. She had them in her yard and they had such beautiful yellow flowers, and she dug up some small ones for me. But for years, I got no yellow flowers. This year, I will have many and I am so happy.
This bugger was on Chris' neck when he got home tonight. Embedded and everything. He probably got it when he was out before lunch. Creepy. Now we have to watch out for these things for the next 2 months...
It is an excellent time of year for studying bird nests. Old ones are completely visible due to the lack of leaves; new ones are being constructed. I have noticed birds of several species carrying straw or other materials. Some classes at school are studying birds. I got a bird nest identification book so that we could study nests and learn which birds made them. Turns out, even with a guide and a bird nest right in front of you, this is hard. I would love to go on a walk with someone who was expert in that area. Yes, that entire paragraph was mainly an excuse to put the drawing in there that I did in my nature journal a few weeks ago.
This little guy opened up today in my garden. Many others will be right behind it, but are buds now. It's another purple flower that lives right in my midst and yet I do not know its name. (Input appreciated.) I didn't plant them, but the people who lived here previously may have. At any rate, they pop up every year quite early in the bed where I plant annuals. By the time I am ready to plant the other flowers, they are gone. They come back the next year regardless of what I put there in the summer or where I put it. Good for them.
My scanner adds a whole new dimension to blogging. Actually, I quite prefer carrying a sketch book and a pencil to carrying a camera... or, I guess I should say, I prefer sketching to taking pictures... but it is a lot slower, and surely less accurate as well.
Above is a sketch of the tiny white violets that are blooming in several locations of my yard. Despite being violets, they are not purple except for the very base of the bottom petal -- the part that cups the pistil and is, in my drawing, cupped under the stem at the right side. The reproductive parts, which I tried to show in the small sketch to the right, are orange and yellow, coming to a triangular point. They are almost enclosed in the soft petals; yet the way the petals fold back at the top makes the whole thing seem inviting. Come in, it says... and if you do, a faint sweet smell will greet you, almost sticky. I am also quite taken with the fringe that surrounds the pistil, making this ordinary lawn plant seem exotic and special. The delicate, irregular flowers grow in clumps, with several flowers and many basal leaves originating from the same place. The clumps themselves grow in clumps... To many, they are weeds, since they manage to grow in lawns among the grass. I take the opposite view, that grass is the interloper that doesn't belong here. That the yard would be better off if the wildflowers took back over.
So each year, a little bit more of my lawn becomes garden. This year, the new garden space is mostly in vegetables, but a few natives will find their way into the edges as well. And meanwhile, conflicted, I will continue to care for the turf grass that is so poorly adapted to this area that, unwatered, it turns yellow midsummer. (This is the fate of my lawn. We will mow and feed; I will stress out about bare patches and having a yard that doesn't look like a magazine picture. But I draw the line at watering that stuff.) One day, perhaps my whole yard will be a small island of native wilderness in the midst of an ordinary subdivision...
But that day will not come soon, because native plants can be expensive at first. In some places -- like my mom's yard -- native seeds remain under the soil and come up without prompting. If I were to leave my yard alone, the only native plants that would grow would be progeny of those I have nurtured over the last five years; and only those that were strong enough to fight through the multitudes of buckthorn and box elder seedlings.
Box elders. The "black" sheep of the maple family (tee-hee). Another yard-dweller about which I am firmly ambivalent. My yard, and my neighbor's, have several ginormous ones growing between them. Based on the number and size of the box elders and buckthorns growing in a line, I am fairly certain this was once a hedge row between two fields. Now, it is a pain. I removed the buckthorns from my yard before I even moved in. No ambivalence there -- those things had to go. The neighbors still have theirs, including the largest single buckthorn I have ever seen, poisoning the soil just two doors down. I spend a lot of time fighting with the seedlings, which sprout all over, planted by birds who think they have hit the jackpot but are actually getting a strong laxative which causes them to, um... plant the seeds before they can get much nutrition out of the berries. Anyhow...
I didn't remove the three huge box elders on the edge of my yard. They're not particularly desirable trees. Actually, I rather dislike them. Their little seedlings sprout everywhere. They grow fast and therefore aren't very strong, so they're a storm danger. Their fast growth also means I have to pay someone to trim them pretty often so they don't hurt the roof or other trees. On the other hand, they provide shade for my garden of lush ferns, which also has May apples, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, a shooting star that actually comes back, wild geranium and lilies of the valley (not native, I know, but they remind me of my grandmother and they smell so delicious). If I got rid of the box elders, these would probably all die of scorching. Even if I replanted something I wanted, it would take years to reach a size that shaded the area again. Not to mention how much this whole endeavor would cost.
So for now they're here, waiting to be trimmed again, but meanwhile starting to bloom. As the twig sketch above shows (or is trying to show), they're covered in clusters of burgundy stamen. They're still tightly packed together, but within a day or two they will spread out and start to make the million seeds that will go everywhere. Curled up and wrinkly, the compound leaves are also emerging, but are still teeny-tiny.
Why do so many of the plants I hate so much show up so early? (I could actually write paragraphs in answer to that, but right now it is meant more as a lament than a scientific question...) And why, if I claim to be a nature-lover, do I have such negative feelings toward so many of the organisms that share my yard with me?
My yard's first daffodils say, "Welcome, spring!"
And the spring responds, "%#$@ you." (Hey, this is a family blog.)
