AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Cornus mas bud8/3/2023 ![]() ![]() I haven’t seen any of the very tiny female flowers yet but with this happening it won’t be long. They make the bushes look as if someone had strung jewels or lights on them. They are very beautiful the way they sparkle and shine as the wind moves them. All the greenish parts seen here are male flower buds just starting to peek out from under the tiny red /purple bud scales. This is what the sticky red female flowers in the previous shot are waiting for.Īlder catkins have started to open up and they’re beautiful as always. Though the catkins, which are just long strings of male flowers, aren’t releasing pollen yet it won’t be long now. This is important, because hazelnuts are wind pollinated. It’s not a great shot but it shows that the catkins have loosened up and lost their winter stiffness, and will now move in the wind. One very windy day I went to try to get a photo of some male hazelnut catkins and this is the so-so result. They are some of the smallest flowers that I try to photograph and they can be a real challenge. If everything goes well each tiny flower will become a hazelnut.įor those who haven’t seen hazelnut flowers, here is a photo from a few years ago with a paperclip for scale. Each tiny red filament coming out of the bud is a female flower and on this day they were radiant and glowing with an inner light. Part of my days have included looking at hazelnut buds and I must have looked at hundreds before I found this one in bloom. You have to look at them every day to catch the various stages. It really is amazing how fast this happens. The sticky red maple female (pistilate) flowers are ready for pollen. These are male (staminate) flowers, many already laden with pollen. ![]() I looked at red maple buds one day and they hadn’t changed much, but then I went back two days later and saw trees full of flowers. They should start singing here any day now. If you’d like to hear them there are videos of them on You Tube, some less than a minute long. They can be tan, brown, green, or gray and have round pads on the ends of their fingers and toes. Some call it a cross but it looks more like an X to me. The easiest way to identify them, if you can even find one in all the leaf litter, is by the X on its back. Standing beside a pond full of them singing on an April evening can be almost deafening. It is a small tree frog which might reach an inch and a half long on a good day, but its small size doesn’t mean it doesn’t have powerful lungs. They play a very important role in the life of the forest in spring and early summer but by August almost all of them will have dried up.įor those who have never seen one, this is a spring peeper. They also ease the burden of finding a water source for many other animals and birds. Much life depends on these pools not only frogs but at least three different salamanders and fairy shrimp rely on them. The ice on vernal pools is melting and I was happy to see this, because places like these is where many spring peeper frogs will sing from. This week the temperature reached nearly 60 degrees on three or four days and we also had some rain, and this meant that most of the snow left in a hurry. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |