March is proving to be a difficult month for a lot of people, where we are all transitioning into a new way of thinking. I know the second part of this statement to be true for wildlife as well. The snow is melting, the Trees are breathing in, budding, and the Birds that we lost with the Sun are singing once again.

The following image is an excerpt from notes that I took when I explored the woods behind my house. Some info on the area: my house is on the Northern end of a town on the Northern end of Cayuga Lake in Upstate New York. Most of this area used to be a swamp, a fact that becomes self-evident when I walk through the woods that lie between my backyard and a cornfield.

Something I found interesting about this landscape, is that the trees on the border of the forest closest to my house are fairly large. But after this initial wall of aged trees are exclusively young ones. I know my neighborhood is relatively new, so I wonder if some of the farmland was bought by developers to create distance between the homes and the fields. Here is a screenshot from Google Earth of the area:

When I first went out a week ago, I didn’t actually go in the woods but just sat in my backyard and observed. The main thing that was different today from then is the amount of birds singing and flying about. Also, none of the trees in my backyard have began to bud. Meanwhile the paper birch trees across the street have had buds since more than a week ago. I never really noticed this difference across species before. I know I’ve been exposed to all of the things in these woods before, but this was the first time I really saw them.