A UVM blog Ethan Allen Homestead

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Final post

By andrew ianni

Spring is here, and the river is flowing. Flowers are starting to bloom and birds are starting to chirp.

The Ethan Allen Homestead has always been deeply rooted with nature, even before Ethan Allen came here. What once was a Native American sanctuary right on the river plenty full with fish and food, has now turned into a protected area where the wildlife is not disturbed. The Wildlife and Nature has always played a huge role on why humans even came here to settle, great soil, lots of game…etc. In a way I guess I could consider my self part of this place, but mostly the Winooski River that it is located on. I grew up fishing that river and fish it very frequently, I have a lot of good memories on that river.

Burlington Walk 3/7/2021

By andrew ianni

We are starting to see some signs of spring, one of the major ones seems to be the Robins have come out to play. I didn’t get any pictures of them because the day I went for my walk it got very cold but I noticed them the day before. They seem to like to land on the ground without snow on it, probably looking for some sort of food.

I believe that this is a Red Maple tree and here you can clearly see the buds on the ends of the branches.
For this Paper Birch tree, these may be the buds that are sticking off the ends of the branches. They are hard to see in this picture.
This is the beautiful Vermont spring snow.
A lot of the ground is cleared of snow but is still very well solid and frozen.
Somehow this tree held on to the majority of its leaves from last year. Not sure how that is going to work when it grows new ones.
This tree has a bunch of red berries in it, also this is one of the trees I saw a lot of Robins in the day before, so maybe they eat these?

I also did walk down to the waterfront and I watched the lake for a while for ducks like Walter was saying to. I saw a drake and hen mallard and a few wads of divers fly by way out in the lake, probably Blue Bills or Goldeneyes going back North.

By andrew ianni
Lots of tracks here going and coming from across the river, could be deer, some squirrels, and maybe muskrat’s because there was open water leading to the tracks.
A lot more opened up in the winter.
Here you can faintly seeing tracks going across the frozen river, looks like whatever it was had really small legs because the steps are so close together.
Lots of people walking here and cross country skiers.
Dog track?
These are some buck rubs I found, all in the same area. They weren’t the most fresh but were definitely from this year.
This is a pretty big rub for VT.
I started to notice a lot of these vines all over all of the trees. I believe it is called Bittersweet and it is an invasive species.
It was all different types of trees.
Goes all the way up the trees.

New Phenology Spot

By andrew ianni

The New Phenology spot I chose is a Natural Area, this area is located in between Airport Park and Lake Champlain and the bike path runs right through it. This spot is in Colchester Vermont and is very different from my last spot, the Ethan Allen Homestead. This natural area is very thick, if it weren’t for the deer trails running through much of it, if you decided to walk straight in you would not be making it very far. Unlike the Homestead, here there is way more lower canopy trees/bushes and very few upper canopy trees. This makes for very good deer woods, by this I mean they like the very thick bushes like in the picture below. I know that there are tons of wildlife here because I have traveled this trail my whole life and seen plenty of deer, snapping turtles and ducks in the natural area. Usually there is a lot more water on the sides of the path, this will hold ducks and other wildlife but since the water is fairly low right now, it is almost completely all dried up. Also here I didn’t see many oak trees which is very different than the Homestead where they are almost taking over. Both of these places are very similar in the way that they both have a very big water source next to them, for the Homestead its the Winooski River and for this natural area its Lake Champlain.

Trail leads to the causeway which can allow you to cross the lake into South Hero.
This is what it seems to look like for miles.
Here you can see a very clear deer trail going from the trail into the Natural Area’s thick shrubs.
Usually this is almost all water.
Maybe we can come here and study it more?

11/8/2020

By andrew ianni

You can see straight through the trees on the other side of the river now, earlier this year you could barely tell there was a field back there.
Saw a bunch of geese lined along the river bank. These geese are probably feeding in the field right behind that row of trees.
Just another picture of the geese.
There almost is no more low vegetation left in the woods here.
Most of the low vegetation dies off in the winter.
The stream still has water.
These are the same maples I took a picture of earlier this year, they were bright red with leaves when I did.
The ground is littered with leaves due to all of the trees having almost all of their leaves off.

Hello world!

By andrew ianni

Ethan Allen Homestead

To get here from UVM you have to go basically North and then take the beltline, it is probably a 15 min drive from UVM. I chose Ethan Allen Homestead because I grew up on the Winooski river basically and I think it would be cool to look at it from an educational stand point rather than a recreational.

  • Here is a Red Oak, this is what the majority of the upper canopy trees lining the river’s edge are.

Smaller Vegetation

This is what you would see for lower vegetation lining the rivers edge.

This was the most common.

I went further down passed Ethan Allen a little bit because I wanted to get a wide view of what the environment down there looks like. There is so much wildlife and vegetation down here but at the same time there is a bridge which means there is constantly sound pollution from the cars. There are also a lot of people that fish along the river’s edge here.

As you can see, Ethan Allen Homestead is going through the peak of its fall foliage right now and it is a extremely beautiful place for a walk.
Across the river you can see through the buffer of trees and a field very faintly.
This is the stream that runs out to the river, as you can see it has been raining a lot lately and the stream has water running out to the river. When I was here not even a month ago this stream was bone dry.
The trees are starting to lose the majority of their leaves which is indicating a transfer from fall to winter. The lower vegetation is starting to die off and the woods are starting to open up.

Wildlife at Ethan Allen

My friend owns a bunch of land right down the river and across it, so I asked him if he could get a picture of a deer on his trail camera for me.

This is a scrape on a tree which shows that a Buck “male deer” was here at one point. They rub their antlers against the tree which takes off a layer of bark.
A beaver damn
Appears to be a Green Frog
This is a Northern Leopard frog I believe
Grey squirrel
Walleye my friends little brother caught with me in the spring.
Small mouth Bass
2 Walleye
This was the biggest walleye I caught in the Winooski river this year, weighed just shy of 10 pounds.

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