Spring is here, the woods are alive with new growth and the city nature challenge has begun!
I’ve never been to salmon hole before, but I loved the way the river looked when we went there for the Winooski mills lab, so after class, I walked down to the river with a friend of mine.
The first thing I noticed was that the ground was covered in these colonies of garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata. It’s an invasive weed that grows prolifically on disturbed ground such as roadsides.
The river looked beautiful, it was a deep blue-green from the sediment. I wonder if this is a healthy color for the river, from my time spent in Maine, I’ve learned that this rich color means that there’s life in the water.
I encountered a bunch of species during my trip, some really common ones like American robin, garlic mustard as mentioned before, lots of moss, but one that I was pretty surprised to find was wild strawberry, I found it nestled between two great slabs of limestone. Another cool thing was that I found some racoon tracks preserved in sediment in a puddle.
One final thing I noticed was that fiddleheads were starting to emerge. These I believe are sensitive ferns since I saw some sensitive fern sporophylls nearby.