April 8th, 2025 —
Today was very cold and wintery for April. It was super windy, 31 degrees, and snowy throughout the day.
Red Oak – 615, White oak – 761, Red maple – 280, and Norway maple – 3261 had no breaking buds or any sign of emerging leaves. They all had little buds, but no bud breaking or any green yet. White oak, while it had no open buds, had old brown leaves from last year still attached to the branches. Sugar maple was the only tree we observed that had some breaking buds. We placed it in the category of 100-1,000 breaking buds, with it still very early in the process.
I took a look at the spring leaf index map on the NPN’s website. This shows how the date of the first spring leaves compares to the average. While the map did not quite reach up to Vermont yet, there was an interesting trend I found. Starting in the southern US, spring leaves came in around 20 days late, then moving further north because average, then 20 days early. Further north to that was another band of 20 days late, then average, then early. Based off this striped trend, Vermont might fall in the average for when the spring leaves arrive. This is relevant to the data I collected, because the spring has been so cold so far, it seems unlikely that the leaves will break early, but also, they are close. Climate change makes phenological changes more unpredictable because of the mismatch of phenological events due to the unnatural fluctuations occurring.