Swampwalker's Journal by David M. Carroll

Author:David M. Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Opening

March 28, 10:30 A.M. In late March I look for the first open water. As I snowshoe to the Shrub Swamp, the only place I see water free of ice is in the briskly running central channel of Alder Brook, where I record a water temperature of 36 degrees. I take any increment above 32 as a sign of spring. The brook’s backwater sedge marsh is icebound, but some me It water lies against its steep west-facing bank, welcome evidence of thaw. The beavers have made a new channel through this marsh. A clear strip of ice delineates the narrow course they have cleared through the dense woolly-fruit sedge. Winter’s thick, persistent covering of ice obliges the beavers to submarine their early spring cuttings along this channel to the open water of the brook. A muddy dragway is worn through alder stands surrounding their new doorway to the water; it is mud season in the beavers’ dooryard, as it is in mine. They keep this entrance clear, trimming back the ice as neatly as they have clipped its bordering shrubs and the upland birches and aspens on the slope behind them. Most of the remaining edging of the sedge marsh, a brushy belt of sweet gale, buttonbush, winterberry, alder, and meadowsweet, has gone unpruned. Close by me in this cover, a song sparrow sings. His clear, exultant, birth-of-spring notes remind me that I should not be impatient with the ice: there is not much of March left to enjoy.

Advancing to the Reedgrass Pool, I find that it, too, is still frozen over. Its milky ice has collected a two-inch layer of water from the early-morning precipitation, which vacillated between rain and wet snow. Rings of open water have melted away from the bases of heat-collecting emergent sedge hummocks and shrub stems. Through the slender windows of this meltwater edged with clear ice I catch glimpses of caddis fly larvae, who have already been at work under the ice mantle, cutting, eating, and building their cases from last season’s reed canary grass. Insect larvae are among the few animals that can be active in water so close to being ice. These narrow openings also allow me to take water temperatures at thaw, revealing slight but important differences in various niches.

As I approach Bear Pond, a pair of great blue herons sails over it. Surveying for open water, they find no place to touch down. Clear trumpetings reverberate in the muted morning. Straining my eyes, I see a solitary Canada goose striding on the ice along the border of the leatherleaf islands. One might think she is calling for the ice to open. Like the red-winged blackbirds, great blue herons, hooded mergansers, mallards, and other returning ducks, the goose will have to look to the brook for water. I am sure all of these end-of-winter returnees from places far away are spending most of their time along the river and its floodplain as they wait for the still-water wetlands to open up.

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