February 21st, 2022 (44°)
Today I took a walk within the city of Burlington and my phenology site. It has certainly been an odd week temperature-wise. Recently we’ve seen temperatures up to 54° in February! Now that’s alarming, to say the least. As I went out into the wild to look for signs of animal tracks I was unfortunately met with minimal dirty snow. But just like any other good naturalist, I carried on and used other tactics to uncover signs of life.
The entirety of my walk downtown consisted of finding zero animal sightings or tracks. Thankfully it was a nice day out and I enjoyed the spring-like walk. It wasn’t until I got to my phenology site that I found signs of life. In the mud, I saw many human-made footsteps, along with domestic dog prints. Although I expected these to be here, as the site is a frequently used passing through path, it was still interesting to see how detailed the prints stayed in the mud. There was a collage of monochromed brown leaves on the forest floor that were most likely fossiled by the snow from the previous fall. As I continued to walk I came across a hole in a fallen tree that was obviously burrowed by some sort of animal.
Things are weirdly starting to warm up in Burlington. This may be strange, but at least the warm weather will bring more lushous life along with it.