Happy start to the semester!
This past Saturday, I once again dedicated my morning to visiting my phenology spot. Despite there being little snow left on the ground, I was excited to see what the lake would look like after this past week’s frigid temperatures, and I was not disappointed!
During my walk over to Oakledge Park, after walking through various South Burlington neighborhoods, I eventually arrived at the coast of Lake Champlain, right near the entrance you take to get to the Burlington Surf Club. Along this coastline, I got my first glimpse of the frozen shorelines that form around Lake Champlain in the winter and got to stop and listen for a few minutes to the sounds the ice was making as the waves rocked into them.
Passing Blanchard Beach right before getting to Oakledge, I was struck by the gorgeous formation the ice had frozen in along the coastline; it was as if the waves had frozen in place, creating a very cool surface to look at! I really wanted to look closer at it and walk more towards where the water actually was, but I was also way too scared of slipping and falling or the ice not being thick enough, so I decided against that.
Once I got to Oakledge, I enjoyed my usual walk to the cove along a path lined with trees, including the sumac trees that I identified last time. While I didn’t see the woodpeckers I saw the last time I was here, I did see a ton of orange-bellied birds! They seemed to be everywhere I looked, and whenever I spotted a bird it seemed to be this orange-bellied species! I used my INaturalist app to try and identify the birds, and I think they were either Typical/Hermit Thrushes or American Robins. When trying to further research this identification to double check it, I learned that American Robins are a type of thrush, so whether the birds were specifically American Robins or another type of thrush, I think that the thrush identification fits well! I also learned that the hermit thrush is Vermont’s state bird, which would explain why I saw so many of them!
After watching the birds for a while, I saw a little path jut off that had more snow cover than most areas of the park, so I decided to venture down to see if I could spot any tracks.
These were the first tracks I saw. To start identifying these tracks, I started by looking at the Track Pattern Key in our Mammal Tracks and Scat guidebook. Based on the different groups, I can easily tell that the animal that made these tracks did so by hopping, and that the tracks are side by side. I then looked at how big the tracks were, starting with the larger hind foot. From the image, the tracks look to be about 5-6cm long, and about 3-4 cm wide. The measurements for the hind foot, along with the alignment of the tracks all together and not at a diagonal point to these tracks being from a gray squirrel! While the snow was partially melted so some of the finer details to confirm this weren’t visible, I think that its an okay guess because I’ve definitely seen a bunch of squirrels in this park before.
These were the next tracks I saw! These were much finer in the snow, which told me that they were probably from a lighter animal, and the first thing I thought of were all the birds that I had seen! The tracks in the snow align with this too because it looks like the animal did little hops all over the place, and that the feet that were touching the ground were skinny and sort of stick like, which reminded me of bird feet!
After having fun tracking in the snow for the first time, I decided to make it to my *official* phenology spot, at Oakledge Cove! When I got there, I wasn’t alone; there was a group of women bundled up in big coats, getting ready to all do a polar plunge into the lake together! Giving them some space, I climbed onto the rocky shore of the peninsula of the cove, and sat listening to the waves until they jumped into the water, moving the large ice sheets that were floating in the cove to clear space for them to dunk themselves into the water. As they moved the ice sheets, it caused the ones closest to the shore to bang into the ice-covered rocks, making a really cool, hollow sounding sound!
Once the cove quieted down and most of the polar plungers had cleared out to warm up in their cars, I started thinking about what phenological changes might have occurred at the cove since I last was here. For the most part, everything looked very similar to how it had before; the evergreen trees still had some needles but all the other trees were bare, the ground was pretty frozen, and there was snow scattered around, but in far less amounts than the last time I was here. However, there was one stark contrast from my last visit and this one, which was the thickness of the ice on the shoreline, and overall just the presence of ice everywhere in the cove! Looking at the shoreline that I had looked at during my last visit, I found even thicker ice, maybe even multiple inches thick, covering all of the rocks. It was really cool, but also challenging to observe because it was so slippery!
To end out my visit, I sat and admired the winter scenery once again, enjoying the peaceful solitude that the cove provided me! I can’t wait to continue revisiting this lovely spot, and fingers crossed, maybe even do my first polar plunge here at some point!