Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Spring may be here or is it summer?

This past week or two has finally brought relief from what seemed like endless snow and cold. But it also seems like we are jumping from winter to summer.

Heading to senior college the past couple of weeks we noticed that the geese have returned. I suspect they don’t like what they see. We saw a couple of pairs wandering through snow in the pond they were returning to with bewildered looks on their faces. You could almost see them saying “What’s this? It’s April!”

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Last week about 60 turkey vultures landed for a while in the trees east of our house. They are big, ugly birds and seeing 60 of them at one place kind of made me wonder who was going to be next. Fortunately they were gone the next day.

I looked up some information about the turkey vultures and learned that as they migrate they like to stop in places where they have trees and water. We had that.

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When I started writing this we still had a fully snow covered front and back yard. Where I shoveled or the city plowed it was still 24” to 36” of snow. With temperatures headed to the 60s and higher I suspected that snow cover would start to disappear.

I had no idea it could disappear so quickly. Monday our yard had a heavy snow cover. By Tuesday afternoon about 25% of the yard was bare. Farm fields are bare.

The previous week I started doing some shoveling of things we normally leave snow covered during the winter. When I got to the small patio there was 2” to 3” of ice under about 12” to 15” of snow. So I shoveled the snow, let it sit for a day, and came after the ice. It popped up easily for the most part.

I’d heard earlier this year some weather folks talking about the shallow depth of frost when we had snow last fall. They talked about how the snow blanketed the ground and insulated it from the severe cold. Heat rising from below melted what frost there was and some snow melting was taking place from the bottom creating ice.

There are a couple of clues that I think proved them correct. One was the ice which was melted snow on our patio and walkways. The other was on our street. We live on a dead end street and at the end there is a curb with a cut for water to flow from the street down to a creek.

  Normally in the spring I go out and chip ice away to open the outlet spout, such as it is. Then the water flows and keeps it open.

This year water started running under the ice along the curb and into the spout. And it started right away which tells me that it was melting from the bottom. We’ve lived here almost 28 years and this is the first time I have seen that.

Here’s hoping that there was significant melting into the ground so that our grass and plants pop up green. The same for farm fields where it will help get crops off to a good start.

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It was fun to see the neighbor kids running around in shorts and T-shirts and riding their bicycles. And people were out walking with just shirts on.

It is interesting to think that if it is 50 or 60 degrees in the summer we have jackets on but in the spring, after winter, 50 degrees seems so warm that shirtsleeves will suffice!

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When the snow melts our focus will be on pond and lake ice. Ice is affected not only by temperature but by warmer water running into pond and lakes, and there has been a lot of that. Spring showers will also have a big impact.

Maybe some of the most happy animals when that pond ice goes will be those geese who are ready to nest and start raising this year’s batch of goslings. They will have a purpose and they can put away their puzzled looks!