I strolled down Main Street with a friend on an overcast afternoon in early March. The temperatures had risen to the high twenties, and much of February’s gifts began to thaw. The grass peeked out from beneath a layer of frost in some places, and we witnessed a large flock of birds taking advantage of this. They looked to be robins mixed in with some darker birds, and they traveled from tree to grass-patch to tree, picking out what food they could along the way.
We continued down through Church Street, towards the waterfront at Lake Champlain. Human activity was at a lull this drab Wednesday afternoon, so constant chirps could be heard if one listened intently. Down at the waterfront, other sounds intrigued my ears.
The recent thaw showed up in the ice formations on edge of the lake. The frozen layer had broken up into smaller, barstool-sized chunks. As waves rolled along, the ice chunks undulated with the water, creating a beautiful slushy-sounding tempo at the edge of the lake. A duck paddled along further out, where space in between the ice chunks allowed for unruffled travel.
I poked around the brambles in between the bike path and the water, finding an assortment of wild tracks among human and dog prints. It’s likely that I found cottontail rabbit, due to form of the tracks and the hopping behavior I observed in the snow. I found some other, very strange prints in the snow. My best guess is a snowshoe, maybe the person, maybe the hare. Based on the strange form of the tracks, it very well could’ve been a person, but still, the hopping motion can be observed, and the tracks are all very compact and circular in their shape. A large hare could make that kind of shape hopping through fresh snow.
Spring still has not yet arrived, as the majority of Burlington’s plants have not yet budded. Despite this, non-human life still seems very much out-and-about as we await the warmer temperatures of Spring.