March

The calendar tells us that spring starts with the equinox on March 20. Too often, this is a cruel joke. March regularly brings days of bitter temperatures and yet more snowfall, along with other days of high winds and rainstorms that break up the ice on the lakes and ponds. Occasionally, we have a bright day with freezing temperatures only at night—the ideal conditions for collecting maple syrup. March sunshine, however brief, is always a reason to celebrate.

Whatever the vagaries of the weather, March is the month that starts in winter and ends with the first signs of spring. The first essay in this chapter recounts a chilly hike along Six Mile Creek, where the only color is found in the evergreen leaves of the magnificent eastern hemlock trees (“Hemlocks”). The next step is an equally wintry visit to Sapsucker Woods that inspired a reflection on woodpeckers (“Woodpeckers, Present and Absent”). As March progresses, many creatures are on the move. Mole salamanders make the arduous journey from their underground burrows to their breeding ponds (“Mole Salamanders”), and red-winged blackbirds are among the first of the summer visitors to return from their overwintering haunts in the south (“The Blackbirds Are Back”).

Hemlocks

For me, the word hemlock always conjures up an image of a wooden cup. I mean the wooden cup right at the center of the enormous painting The Death of Socrates, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1787 and now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Socrates is accepting the cup into his right hand while looking the other way and pointing upward with his outstretched left hand. Apparently, he was thoroughly preoccupied by the philosophical implications of the possibility of an afterlife. The wooden cup is the infamous cup of hemlock, the standard method of execution in late fourth century BCE Athens.

The ancient Greeks could have used any part of the hemlock plant (Conium maculatum) to make their extract because the poisonous alkaloids permeate the entire plant, from the root tip to shoot, including petals and seeds. The officials responsible for carrying out the death sentence would have had no difficulty getting their supplies because hemlock is widespread throughout Western Europe, and it is very conspicuous. It grows to 5–8 feet and has clusters of many tiny white flowers and finely dissected leaves, like parsley. That is presumably why hemlock is sometimes referred to as poison parsley, although the nickname in Ireland, devil’s porridge, is even more evocative. You cannot mistake a full-grown hemlock, with its purple stem and unpleasant, mousy smell. The catch is in early spring when the young shoots are still green and odor-free. Then, hemlock looks just like wild parsley . . . and there are a few fatalities every year. If you want food for free from the countryside, you need to know what you are doing.

Devil’s porridge came to North America with the early European settlers, and it has spread to every US state. However, when people around here refer to hemlock, they don’t mean Conium maculatum. They are thinking of a very different plant: the eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis. The eastern hemlock is routinely described as a graceful or handsome tree. In silhouette, it looks almost feathery because it sports masses of fine twigs, each one dipping gently to its tip. If you crush the leaf of the Tsuga hemlock, your fingers will smell kind of mousy, like the Conium hemlock. Consequently, the settlers gave the unfamiliar tree a familiar name: hemlock.

A quick leafy digression is in order here. Although the Tsuga hemlocks are in the pine family (i.e., they are related to spruces, pines, and firs), their needles are flat, not spiky, and very short. This makes them look almost like the Thujas, which also have flattened leaves but are members of the cypress family. Going further down the rabbit hole, don’t forget that the cypresses include North American cedars, such as the majestic California redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens). These are not to be confused with old-world cedars (Cedrus, including the cedar of Lebanon), which have round needles and are in the pine family (i.e., they are fairly closely related to Tsuga hemlocks).

All of which is a wandering preamble to our recent walk along a stretch of Six Mile Creek. The water of the creek was churning, swollen by a partial snowmelt caused by two days of warm weather earlier in the week. For long stretches of our walk, the steep slopes that towered above us were clothed in maples, hickories, and oaks—leafless winter sentinels waiting for spring. In the hazy sunshine, it was a bright world of brilliant white snow and gray tree trunks. Then we entered a stand of hemlock trees. Under the dense canopy of evergreen leaves, this was a place of perpetual shade. It was noticeably cooler in the gloom. The snow lay thickly, and all sounds were muffled. We felt compelled to step lightly and walk in silence.

The local hemlock groves are very special. That makes it all the harder to reflect on the troubled history of this tree. The problem is that hemlock trees happen to be well endowed with tannins, which are complex polyphenols that precipitate proteins. These tannins deter most would-be munchers of hemlock leaves and bark; deer and other mammals, as well as most insects, leave these trees alone unless they are desperately hungry. It seems that the only animals that like tannins are humans, who use this material in traditional methods for tanning leather. The early colonists met their need for tannins by stripping bark from hemlock trees with a sharp knife, an activity that frequently killed the tree. The hemlock forests could tolerate small-scale, artisanal tanneries, but they were devastated when tanning grew to a major industry across upstate New York in the nineteenth century. Compounding this environmental vandalism, the tanneries were responsible for an uncontrolled release of toxic chemicals into the air and local waterways.

The hemlocks were saved by the discovery of synthetic tanning agents in the early twentieth century. The tanning industry was freed from the need for proximity to hemlock forests and moved to locations with better transport infrastructure. Over the last century, the hemlocks have gradually returned.

Now our hemlocks are facing a new danger: the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). These aphid-like insects attach to the base of the needles and feed continuously on the plant sap. A heavy infestation weakens and, ultimately, kills the tree. The hemlock woolly adelgid probably arrived on a Japanese hemlock bought by a wealthy Virginia landowner who, in 1911, was constructing an oriental garden. Although the insects spread and were reported on hemlock trees in various places in Virginia by the 1950s, the hemlock woolly adelgid was not considered a serious pest—at least not until the 1980s, when they reached the hemlock forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Then all hell broke loose. Hemlocks, once widespread and common trees in the southern reaches of the Appalachians, suffered mass die-offs. Since then, the hemlock woolly adelgid has rapidly extended its range, including to New York State.

Nevertheless, we have reason to be optimistic for the hemlocks in our area. Entomologists have been investigating various natural enemies of the hemlock woolly adelgid. A contender for the role as the savior of the hemlock is Laricobius nigrinus. This small beetle hails from the Pacific Northwest of America, where it feeds exclusively on the native adelgids that infest the western hemlock tree. Luckily, these insects are also happy to eat the hemlock woolly adelgid introduced from Japan to the eastern US. L. nigrinus has been released into the hemlock forests of New York State and other states, down to Virginia and Georgia. It appears that the introduced beetles are getting established, and early data suggest they are reducing the adelgid populations.

The hemlock woolly adelgid is relatively easy to spot because the insects aggregate together and secrete lots of stringy, white wax that looks like an irregular ball of wool. These wool balls are evident most of the year, apart from high summer. As I have said, though, the trees by the path along Six Mile Creek looked healthy. We could see no tell-tale patches of white wool on the twigs or leaves. All good, so far.

Although my first thought on hearing the word hemlock is Socrates and his wooden cup of hemlock poison, my subsequent thoughts are always with the Tsuga hemlocks and the little brown beetles that may be their salvation.

Woodpeckers, Present and Absent

In early March, Sapsucker Woods is one of the very best birdy haunts in our local area. The deciduous woodland, swamp forest, and large beaver pond are all the more special because its name, Sapsucker, is a reminder of one of the loveliest of our summer visitors.

The sapsucker, or more correctly the yellow-bellied sapsucker, is a migratory woodpecker. During the summer months, we often see this pretty, little bird with its distinctive black and white plumage and bright red patches at the top of its head and nape of its neck. The yellow-bellied bit is all too easy to miss; there’s a faint tinge of off-white or pale lemon on its front. All this is special enough, but the feeding habits of the sapsucker are even more remarkable.

As the name suggests, the sapsucker feeds on the sap of trees. It drills a hole into a living tree to access the vascular tissues lying just below the bark, then it lets the sweet sap ooze out and licks it up as it flows. It’s a bit like a cat lapping up milk, only smarter. The outer edge of the sapsucker tongue is lined with tiny hairs that pull the sap into the bird’s mouth by capillary action.

The sapsucker has two kinds of sap to choose from: the sugary phloem sap just under the bark and, a little deeper, the watery xylem sap. During the summer, the birds choose the phloem sap. They drill shallow, vertical slits into the tree, usually in a straight line going up the trunk, and then they keep the sap flowing by regularly returning and reopening the wound, often making the slit bigger. It’s said that the sapsucker may have an anticoagulant in its saliva, so the wounds don’t reseal. These gashes in the tree are called sap wells. The birds also snack on the soft plant tissues under the bark—and insects, seeds, and fruit are also on their menu. Sapsuckers have been seen to dunk individual ants or other insects into the sap flow before feeding their young with the sweetened insect meat.

In the dregs of winter, it is fun to think of sapsuckers, although we won’t be seeing them until late April at the earliest. They will arrive hungry from their long journey from Florida, the Caribbean, or Mexico, but the phloem sap won’t be ready for them until after bud burst in mid-May. Until then, the birds focus on the rising sap in the xylem vessels. The xylem sap wells are small and round, just the right size for inserting their beak, and very different from the gaping wounds of phloem sap wells in the summer. A single bird can tend up to a dozen neat xylem sap wells in a horizontal line around the trunk.

So there were no sapsuckers at Sapsucker Woods today. Instead, there were other woodpecker treats. We heard the unmistakable drumming of a pileated woodpecker, which is as big as a crow and as black as pitch apart from some white striping around the head and neck, and a rich red crest. Our noisy pileated woodpecker had clearly found a perfect dead tree for doing the pileated equivalent of banging on a drum. The rapid staccato drumbeats, very fast and in bursts, resonated around the woodland. In case anyone needed reminding, “This is our territory—all ours!” To be clear, “our” means a firmly bonded pair who live together in a well-defined territory through the year. There is great equality of the sexes in the pileated woodpecker world. Both sexes drum and maintain the territory. The male drives out male interlopers, and the female chases out females. Pity the young birds, whose chance of getting a territory depends on an older bird falling off its metaphorical perch. When that happens, the incoming bird bonds with the surviving resident.

The pileated is the biggest woodpecker in our neck of the woods, and it is probably the biggest woodpecker in the country. We cannot be sure, however, because of the controversial status of another species: the ivory-billed woodpecker, a denizen of old-growth forests farther south. All the pictures suggest that the ivory-billed is the most elegant of birds, black and white with a great red crest and long, heavy beak that looks like pure ivory (but isn’t, of course; bird beaks are made of cross-linked keratin, like finger-nails). How wonderful to watch this great bird, perhaps sweeping from tree to tree with its 30-inch wingspan or stripping bark from a tree trunk with its fearsome beak to access beetle larvae. Many say that the ivory-billed woodpecker is strictly past tense, along with the dodo and the passenger pigeon, but there are persistent claimed sightings in the swamp forests of Louisiana. Although the photos and videos are smudgy, they have been interpreted by some people to match the size, wing beat characteristics, and flight speed of the ivory-billed. I want to be persuaded by these Louisiana sightings—and be encouraged by whisperings of sightings in the remote south of Cuba—but the evidence is disconcertingly flaky. Although there have been no definitive sightings since 1944, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2023) has hesitated to rule the ivory-billed woodpecker as definitively extinct in the US.

Let’s shift our focus to the west of Mexico, the habitat of yet another woodpecker, the imperial. Closely related and similar in appearance to the ivory-billed, the imperial woodpecker is the largest woodpecker species in the world . . . but past tense is probably appropriate here, too. The imperial lived in small groups in mature pine forests, and, by all accounts, the birds were noisy, conspicuous, and slow flying. They didn’t stand a chance when the loggers came in and the locals got access to guns. The last documented evidence for the imperial was in 1956.

Thank goodness, the conservation status of the pileated woodpecker is described as least concern. The pileated gets along very well in just about any mature woodland that has plenty of dead trees. Sapsucker Woods is perfect. We stood silently in the snow as the drumming echoed through the trees.

Mole Salamanders

It is received wisdom that the weight-bearing fin is a clever trick. I am referring to the paired fins at the front end (the pectoral fins) and back end (the pelvic fins) of the body; the dorsal fin, anal fin, and tail fin aren’t weight bearing. Some might say that clunky, weight-bearing fins have their drawbacks. You may be a bit clumsy in open water, lacking the finesse with steering and braking that is possible with fancy fin rays. It might be a good idea to avoid gymnastics competitions alongside butterfly fish on a coral reef and to ignore odious comparisons with tuna fish, those top oceanic athletes with rippling body wall muscles and gargantuan tail thrusts. Instead, reflect on how weight-bearing fins at the front and back enable you to walk around on the seabed instead of squirming on your belly and allow you to lift your head out of a shallow oxygen-deficient swamp to gulp some air. Best of all, you can march fearlessly into a new world called land.

Before you know where you are, you are an amphibian and can walk, hop, or jump around on land. Most likely, though, you won’t travel far because you have to return to water in order to breed. (I write “most likely” because a few amphibians have devised ways to keep their eggs damp on land.) The best time to come back to water to breed is the spring. There’s plenty of water after the snow melts, and, with the warmer temperatures, the bottom of the food chain is getting into gear. That means oxygenated waters, courtesy of algal photosynthesis, and plenty of little animals, such as rotifers, amphipods, and flatworms, are on the menu for your offspring.

It is no surprise, then, that very early spring is the time of the salamander migrations. I am referring especially to mole salamanders (Ambystomatidae). These wonderful creatures are only found in North America, and at least eighteen species in total are in our area; including two common species, the Jefferson salamander (Ambystoma jeffersonianum) and the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum). They are called mole salamanders because they spend the daytime, and the winter, in burrows that they dig in the loose soil of the forest floor. Although their legs are short and not so strong, these creatures can scoop out a burrow in soil already disturbed by other creatures, from earthworms to deer mice, or by frost heave during the winter. Digging duty is much reduced for those that happen upon the winter burrow of a hibernating mammal. These lucky ones just crawl in and share the residence.

The spring mole salamander migration is a Lilliputian wonder. It is a trek of up to several hundred yards from a relatively dry patch of woodland down to a pond. This trek can start anytime from sunset and can take hours because a salamander’s limbs are short and not designed for sprinting. Adult life distant from a pond is not an option.

The perfect place to see the mole salamander migration hereabouts is the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University, which sports ponds and fragments of woodland alongside the fairways and greens. The ponds are shallow and, importantly, don’t have fish that eat the salamander eggs and larvae. You could say the golf course landscape is designed for losing golf balls and promoting mole salamander populations.

We had our first mild and rainy day early in the third week of March this year. We left the car on the side of the road and took the path to a long fairway of manicured grass. We could feel the frozen ground beneath the squelch and puddles of the day’s rain, and the remaining patches of snow glistened in the light of our flashlights. We walked slowly and steadily, scanning the ground with the flashlights. Aha! There’s one! The unmistakable brown-gray Jefferson salamander, about 6 inches long, its head raised and beady black eyes glistening in our lights. It was marching purposefully down the slope toward the pond, its body undulating and its long tail dragging along the ground behind. The Jeffersons will mate in the pond, and the females will lay small groups of eggs onto twigs or other vegetation submerged in the water. The larvae will hatch two weeks later and will remain in the pond, eating and growing, until midsummer. Then they will metamorphose into adult salamanders and return to the woodland for their adult life of burrowing.

There was no sign of the spotted salamanders on that first trip to the golf course. The evening was still too cold, hovering just above freezing. The following week offered more rain and temperatures in the low 40s (6–9°C). This was much more the thing for spotted salamanders. We arrived soon after sunset, and we paced the fairway and edge of the adjacent woodland. The snow had gone, and the ground was soggy. It was perfect.

Armies of marching spotted salamanders were on the move, each individual in its uniform of black or dark gray with two lines of bright yellow spots extending along the body. The spotteds are bigger and chunkier than the Jeffersons but, like the Jeffersons, they were unfazed by the sudden exposure to the bright lights. If an animal was walking, it just kept on walking, and if it was still, it remained still. As with the Jefferson, the spotted lays eggs close to the pond edge, and the larvae will emerge and metamorphose during the summer.

I am neglecting one aspect of the spring salamander migrations. We are not the only people who find them splendid. On the Jefferson night, there were a few other groups of people, all visible by their flashlights. But the night of the spotted was warm, and it turned out to be The Night. There were two or three other cars on the road when we arrived. By the time we had left at about 8:30 p.m., the site was a mass of marching flashlights and loud hollering, and more than fifty cars were parked nose-to-tail beside the road, right to the far end. It felt as though half of Ithaca was there. By 10 p.m., it would be a human scrum. Everyone seemed to be careful where they stepped, but one could not help but be anxious for the salamanders. This local human disturbance is trivial compared to all other amphibian travails caused by climate change, disease, and habitat loss. Still, I wonder whether we humans should limit our enthusiasm for events like the Golf Course Salamander Migration.

The Blackbirds Are Back

On the last Sunday morning of March, I was walking around the Cornell Botanic Gardens when, all of a sudden, my ears were assaulted by an unholy din. It was a cacophony of bird noise. The racket came in two parts. The first was a single note, endlessly repeated: check-check-check. That’s the call. The second was a bit more complicated: two swift, clear notes and then a buzz. Think of conk-la-ree, with a vibrating flourish on the ree, and you are on the way to learning what is euphemistically called the song. Make sure to get your conk-la-ree all done and dusted within one second, then take a swift breath and say it again . . . and again . . . and . . .

It was wonderful. The song hardly compares to, say, a nightingale’s, but it is a sure sign of spring.

The conk-la-ree bird is our local blackbird—or, to be formal, the red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus). The male is perfectly black, including its eyes, beak, and legs right down to the claws, except for a bright red patch bordered with yellow at the bend of the wings. A quick dive into birdy vocabulary informs us that the bend in the wing is the wrist, and the colorful patches are known as epaulets. When the male is displaying, he puffs up his epaulets, making him look super-fierce to competitors and super-alluring to females.

The din was made by vast numbers of male blackbirds in the trees and on the reeds surrounding the main pond in the botanic garden. This is a perfect habitat for blackbirds, which like to be close to water, whether it is the edge of a lake or pond or a roadside ditch. The winter ice on the pond was almost entirely thawed, with just small fragments remaining, and the large goldfish were gliding about in the dark water. No turtles yet, though.

I looked about carefully for the female blackbirds, which are a fair bit smaller than the males and streaky brown, little different from the plumage of juvenile birds. I didn’t see any. I must have visited the botanic gardens during the week or so after the males return to their breeding grounds to set up their territories, but before the females arrive.

For the male blackbird, a great deal hangs on getting the real estate in place. Prime territory and the most dashing epaulets mean that multiple females will be interested. A superstar male can persuade up to fifteen females to nest in his territory. That sounds tremendous, except that he is then duty bound to contribute to the feeding of many families. A successful male blackbird must look the part, sing the part, and then spend his days catching damselflies, mayflies, soldier flies, and the occasional moth for the many offspring of his harem.

His workload will be all the greater if the nest of one or more of his various mates receives a visit from a brown-headed cowbird. Alas, blackbirds are favorite hosts for eggs dumped by the female cowbird, and they are always duped into feeding the ravenous cowbird nestling in preference to their own young. As I walked away from the crowd of singing male blackbirds, a male cowbird flew up from the ground. He looked very sleek, his body a glossy black and his head a rich chocolate brown. The cowbirds are also planning for their breeding season.

Not all male blackbirds manage to carve out a territory. Indeed, most second-year males (meaning the birds that were born in the previous year) have no place to call their own, and they hang around through the breeding season. These birds are known as floaters, and they like to sneak in and mate with females when the territory-holding males are looking the other way. A floater will sire few, if any, offspring, but he doesn’t have to work hard to feed the young, whether blackbird or cowbird.

The many struggles of parenthood, and the risks of being cuckolded by a floater or parasitized by a cowbird, are all in the future. For now, the priority for every male blackbird is to sing his heart out—to establish his place in the world.