Note: I visited my phenology spot on March 24th, so these pictures are less relevant to the time of this posting
Hello NR1020-er’s! For my third installment of this semester’s phenology, I returned to my initial spot of Centennial Woods. After a fresh blanket of snow late in the season–there were virtually no spring-like showings during this visit. Even mud was covered by the weekend’s powder!
As you can probably see, spring has not exactly sprung at the time of my visit. I did my best to really squint my eyes and ears for signs of springtime phenological changes, and found a few:
This ID I’m not super certain on–but I determined this to be the buds of a sugar maple, mostly based off the the three distinct points. This woody stem was slightly taller than me.
At about hip level, I found the buddings of an American Beech!
Besides these two types of buds, I didn’t find much else that was beginning to arc towards the typical springtime phonological characteristics, which made this visit to Centennial woods quite brief. I did hear some brief birdsong, but not continuous enough for me to get even a 2-second long recording to ID after my visit. I suppose I picked a poor time to visit.
To compound the uneventful nature of my visit, the only traces of mammal activity I found were human tracks in the snow, and tracks so distinctly-domestic-dog that I did not even question that idea that they could have been a type of fox or otherwise. All dog tracks were kept close to the human tracks, irregular and non-direct register.