While most years in Vermont mid April means flowers, birds signing, warmer days and a healthy mix of sun and rain this year has been different. As of the last couple weeks it has been very cold and has not felt much like spring. Everytime spring seems to be here the weather changes and we end up with more snow. This affects both plants and animals. My friend and I spent an hour walking around the Salmon Hole today looking for any sign of spring. There simply isn’t much happening yet. While I suspect that since there is water there are amphibians we did not see any or any sign such as eggs or tracks in the mud. We saw almost no sign of life except a few trees starting to bud out and a couple of plant species starting to grow. We saw a couple of plants such as moss and wild strawberry plants starting to grow and one plant that I thought might be a flower but was unable to tell. The one tree that we found that looked like the buds were starting to break, or at least getting ready to, we were unable to identify. We thought it might be a cherry or maybe an ash but it was hard to tell with the tree being unhealthy and soaking wet changing how the bark looked. The Salmon Hole is surrounded by an edge. The edge starts within about 50 to 100 feet of any given point and it turns into fairly old growth woods. This edge creates good places for song birds and mice to live, as well as animals like raccoons. The woods is home to species like deer and grey squirrels as well. These last two species tend to live in forest interiors so it suggests that this edge does support forest interior species and I have seen sign of species like fox and bobcat in the area which also tend to be forest interior species. Hopefully the Salmon Hole will start to green up once spring finally arrives here in Vermont and the animals will move back in to this amazing little spot in Burlington.
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