I've been outdone by a one ounce bird.  All year, I've been struggling to decipher the mysteries of incubation then keeping the chicks alive until they're ready to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, with little fuss, our song sparrow has hatched all four of her eggs and raised them until they're nearly fledged.  I see her perched here and there with insects in her mouth at least once a day, and the chicks were so well fed that they only cracked their eyes sleepily when I stuck the camera lens down onto the nest.

All this despite a variety of disasters that I did nothing to avert.  I forgot to mention the nest before Mark mowed the garden, but its location tucked up against a stump saved the day.  The cats both came down to frolic in the mule garden as I planted there last week and our dog is always patrolling, but none caught the scent.  Despite all of these potential catastrophes, four eggs turn into four chicks with nary a loss.  Maybe I should ask my favorite sparrow if she's willing to take on an apprentice?

"Be careful!  I almost stepped on you!"

I was walking down to the far end of the furthest garden patch to check on our three week old chicks, and at first I thought the little bird flitting out from under my feet was a baby chicken that had hopped through a gap in the fence to explore the outside world.  But it flew up and away into the bushes --- a sparrow, not a chick.

"What were you doing down there?" I asked.  (Yes, I do talk to birds, snakes, toads, and plants in the garden.)  I crouched down to look into the grass that had grown up in a hard-to-mow spot beside a small stump and gasped in delight.  Four tiny, speckled eggs, mere feet away from my oldest cucumber patch.

I barely caught a glimpse of the mother, but I'll assume she was a song sparrow since they're our most common yard sparrows at this time of year.  If so, I only have to keep the mower away from her nest for the next three weeks --- 12 to 13 days of incubation, then 10 days of chick rearing before the mother turns the youngsters over to their dad and moves on to brood number two.  (At this time of year, it might even be brood 3.)  Sounds a bit like the way I foisted off my own chick-rearing duties on a hen last month....

Have you been hearing reports about the periodic cicadas and wonder if they'll show up in your neck of the woods?  I stumbled across a great website --- magicicada.org --- that includes answers to every question you may have (and probably several you didn't even think to ask) about the currently active cicadas.  For those of you who are technically inclined, 2011's edition is brood XIX, which is a type of thirteen year cicada that lives in the areas pictured on the map above.

Go here and input your state and county to find out when periodical cicadas have been sighted in your neck of the woods.  In general, 13 year cicadas live in the south while 17 year cicadas are found in the north, but the Appalachian Mountains count as "the north" by cicada standards.  Scott County, Virginia, (where I live) had 17 year cicadas flying in 2008, which means we aren't slated for another showing until around 2025.  I guess I'd better practice patience.

The title of this post is a bit misleading.  Yes, the Spring Beauties did start blooming a week ago, and the woods is currently alive with hepatica, rue anemone, buttercup, sedge, and trout-lily flowers.  But when I went out with the camera this morning, I was drawn away from the blossoms and toward the other signs of spring.  The photo above is a Dryad Saddle poking out of a stump in our garden.

Our buckeye trees are just starting to leaf out.  I'm glad we're located on the north side of a hill because that shade slowed our trees down just enough that they didn't get nipped by the hard freeze earlier this week.

Looks like a squirrel was hanging out in this hollow tree all winter.

My eyes are always peeled for the first spring flowers, but this year, I seem to be more interested in the insects on those flowers.  Perhaps it's because I'm obsessed with chicken foraging, and chickens love bugs, or maybe I'm just starting to get a real inkling for how important insects are in the landscape.

Except for our honeybees, I hadn't seen a single insect until about two weeks ago when the Commas/Question Marks (I never look closely enough to tell the difference) and the Mourning Cloaks started flying.  Within days, the Spring Azures had joined them, and this week I even saw big, showy Tiger and Zebra Swallowtails visiting my manure pile.

Butterflies are the prettiest early spring insects, but they aren't alone out there. When the hepaticas started blooming a week and a half ago, tiny little beetles were busy collecting pollen, and this week I started seeing Greater Bee Flies hovering around flowers.

I love how in sync the natural world is.  Bee flies show up one day; the next day, our first nectarine flowers open.  I get bit by a mosquito one day; the next evening a bat is swooping through the air gathering dinner.  It's all a reminder that the beautiful spring flowers we love so much didn't evolve for human enjoyment.  Flowers are here for the bees, so we need to protect our pollinators if we want the show to go on.

At this time of year, every day is a different season.  Last week, we were sweltering on 90 degree afternoons, but this weekend rain brought highs in the lower seventies.

The woods is completely different during a cool rain than when the sun is shining.  Sounds are muffled by the wet leaves and my eyes turn down toward the ground where treasures are easy to find.

This box turtle was walking down a rutted deer trail, his brilliant red eyes the brightest I've ever seen.  In fact, the turtle's orange face and fiery eyes were quite a bit brighter than the fallen leaves --- prematurely brown because of a mild drought.  Lucy patiently sat and stayed while I fiddled around with the camera and took about two dozen photos from four different angles.  Thanks for waiting, Lucy!

"Is that an oyster mushroom?" I asked Lucy as we walked along our regular morning path down the driveway and through our floodplain woods.  I had followed the same route approximately 1,500 times over the last four years, never paying any attention to the dead elm tree standing beside the path.  But this morning, dense fog made the pale mushrooms almost glow in the dim woods.

The only wild mushrooms I feel comfortable eating are morels, but I've been picking mushrooms just like these off backyard logs for a couple of years.  So I started to run through a litany of field marks.  Mushrooms growing in a cluster from a dead tree?  Check.  Off-centered, short stem with pale gills running nearly to the base?  Check.  Cap pale in color and smooth on top (often becoming damp with morning dew or fog?)  Check. 

I went home and flipped through a couple of field guides for more information.  They admonished me to peer a bit more closely and see if the gills had non-serrated edges --- yep.  Were the stems hairy?  I had to zoom way in to tell, but soon discovered that the stems were indeed quite fuzzy near the base.

The real clincher came when I stood on tiptoe and plucked the mass of mushrooms off the tree --- they smelled exactly like my cultivated oyster mushrooms.  Edible Wild Mushrooms of Noth America: A Field-to-Kitchen Guide also set my mind at ease with one short sentence: "There are no toxic look-alikes."  Mark and I opted to eat the whole bowlful for lunch --- they were delicious.

For the first time Saturday, I could smell the rich autumnal odor of newly fallen leaves as I walked Lucy.  I barely managed to force myself into finishing my chores before I set out into the woods.

My goal, as always, was to head up the hillside to the older woods, but I had to pass through grown up pasture to get there.  Half a century into its childhood, the young woods on the lower parts of our property still has Japanese Honeysuckle being stifled in the understory.  But the brilliant Purple-gilled Laccaria caught my eye with its nearly pornographic shape and color.  By the time I'd finished photographing one old specimen and her more demure younger siblings, I nearly believed that there was a fertile, earth goddess present, repairing human havoc.

Lucy bounded ahead of me, making more noise than one dog possibly should while leading me to richer woodlands.  Soon I stumbled across three ferns growing so close together I could fit them into one camera frame --- now that's diversity.

Up here, the entire cove was blanketed with White Snakeroot in full bloom.  This woodland relative of Boneset and Joe Pye Weed is poisonous, and its poisons can pass from grazing animals to humans through their milk.  "Milk sickness" killed many European settlers to our region, along with their horses, goats and cows.  On my protected hillside, though, its beauty is all that matters.

No walk in the woods is complete without finding something I can't identify off the top of my head.  This lemon-balm-scented flower is Northern Horse-Balm (Collinsonia canadensis), which I've seen before but never in bloom.

I followed a couple of different deer trails until I ended up near the top of my property, where a line oak had attained a diameter of perhaps four feet.  Lucy barked at snakes while I unpacked my library book and two cucumbers snagged from the garden on my way out the door and settled in for a beautiful morning.

Despite my snack, I felt an urgent compulsion to return home at precisely 11:50, so I wandered down the hill past this Hearts-a-Bursting (Euonymus americanus), and back to my lunch.  Even without a watch, my stomach knows its schedule.

This shy garter snake was perched three feet in the air amid a mass of wingstems.  I often see black rat snakes on a tree limb, but hadn't realized that other snakes in our area like to climb.  It always amazes me that a leg-less snake is able to ascend several feet off the ground.

I wish I'd gotten a better shot, but the fact that I got any photo at all is a tribute to our new Canon camera.  I zoomed all the way in for this introductory image, then stepped closer for a second shot.  With barely a rustle, the snake had disappeared into the weeds.

Mark and I splurged on a Canon Power Shot SX20 IS last week, and ever since I've been a photo-taking spree.  Here are a couple of my favorite shots from the week --- sure signs that fall is on its way.

I've been using a Fujifilm Finepix S1000fd for the last couple of years, and am still enchanted by its vivid colors and intense magnification of macro subjects.  But I've literally worn the front of the camera off with two years of hard use, so I figured it was worthwhile to experiment with the next grade up.  Photos from the Canon appear to be at least as vivid, and the documentation promises that our new camera will focus even closer than our old one.  So far, I'm quite pleased with the upgrade.

A week and a half ago, I noticed this little critter swimming through a puddle of tadpoles in our floodplain.  The insect was translucent and hard to see (and very hard to photograph), but its manner of swimming using all six legs was distinct enough to catch my attention.  Every so often, it paused in its flight and drifted to the surface, letting its tail break the boundary between water and air and suck oxygen down into its body.

I finally stumbled across information about the Giant Diving Beetle and its larval form, called the Water Tiger, on the Royal Alberta Museum's website.  I've included their photograph, which is a thousand times better than mine, so that you can get an idea of what the insect really looked like.

It turns out that my beautiful, elegant critter is a cold-blooded killer.  Here's what the Museum has to say about the Water Tiger:

Yikes!  I guess those tadpoles aren't as safe as they thought they were in their vernal pool.

I haven't been able to keep you up to date on the crescendo of spring --- wildflowers unfurling, migrants arriving, and tree leaves poking out of buds.  With new faces and songs greeting me each morning, I've been too overwhelmed to post anything.  Maybe this picture will be worth a thousand words.

I live on a plateau raised about fifteen feet above a swampy floodplain, so I assumed the toad I heard calling last night was down there in the damp.  But it sounded awfully loud....  When the toad started trilling again this evening, I braved the rain and caught him in the act...sitting on a floating piece of wood in the kiddie pool I use to soak my shiitake and oyster mushroom logs.  I guess a bit of duckweed and a place to sit turn a kiddie pool into toad habitat.  Now where will I soak my mushrooms?

Do you want to see a wildflower display so exuberant that it made my computer programmer brother's jaw drop?  Then stop by Sugar Hill's Cliff Trail.  I've included a few photos of the highlights of our Sunday hike, but you have to visit for yourself to see the dozens of different species ranging in color from white to pink to red to blue to purple.

Red Columbine is beginning to bloom on the rocks near the top of the trail.

I'm ashamed to say that I always think that Squirrel Corn is Dutchman's Breeches until I look it up in a book.  Both are in the same genus and look quite similar, but the blooms on Dutchman's Breeches have much longer spurs (like pant legs) compared to the shorter lobes found on Squirrel Corn (and shown above.)  Maybe writing this down will help me remember?

Have you ever seen this many trilliums?  This photo captures a small section of the huge patch coating the north side of Sugar Hill.

Virginia Bluebells near the Frenchman's settlement are plants out of place.  If you want to take a longer hike, you can see them in their natural habitat on the west half of the River Trail.

Don't forget to take in the view when you reach the top of Sugar Hill.  With the leaves off the trees, it's easy to pick out St. Paul, trace the path of the Clinch River, and enjoy the pastoral scenes of nearby farmland.  Plus, planted pears spice up the view with their white blooms.

On the way back along the river trail, we discovered that the flowers of sassafras are perhaps even tastier than the leaves.

I hope you get a chance to put on your hiking boots and visit your favorite wildflower spot before the blooms fade.

The first native flower I see blooming in the spring is often an American Hazel.  This shrub blends into the background in the summer, but in March the catkins stand out in the brown woods.  First they look like this...

...then the catkins lengthen and soften until they are dangling in the breeze.  These are the male flowers, chock full of pollen to be carried on the wind to a nearby plant.

If you look carefully at the hazel twig, you'll find miniscule (but brilliant) female flowers above the male catkins.  Since gravity tends to drag pollen down as it wafts away on the breeze, female flowers are unlikely to be pollinated by the male flowers beneath them --- a good thing since the whole purpose of pollination is to mix up the offspring's genetics by combining two different bushes' genes.

Many of the other wind pollinated trees in our woods bloom in March as well.  You can probably imagine how much more likely their pollen is to reach another flower if the plants bloom before the leaves come out on the trees.  Red Maples and Slippery Elms are some of my favorite early tree flowers --- although they're tiny, if you look closely you'll be enthralled by their beauty and intricacy.

(Even though I'm talking about wind pollinated trees and shrubs, the first showy early spring ephemerals are out too!  Hit the woods and see for yourselves.)

If you want to be an instant expert, learning frog and toad calls is the way to go.  Chances are, you probably have a dozen or fewer species living in your area, so you can't get too confused.  Better yet, frogs and toads start calling one or two at a time --- first the peepers and chorus frogs, then the Wood Frogs and toads, then the summer frogs.  By the time July rolls around, you'll know them all!

But you'd better hit the woods now or you'll miss the early callers.  I captured our Wood Frogs in the embedded video last week, and I expect the high trill of the American Toads to join the chorus any day now.

I like to scout likely puddles, ponds, and marshy areas during daylight, then head out after dark to hear the calls at their peak.  All it takes to learn frog calls is a wet night over 50 degrees Fahrenheit and a flashlight.

If you want to brush up on your calls before you go out, the Patuxet Wildlife Research Center has a fun frog quiz --- you select your state and the site will test you on all of the local species.  I had trouble getting those sound files to work, though, and had better luck with the Frogs and Toads of Tennessee website. 

Do you have a favorite online source for frog and toad calls?  Leave a comment and let us know.

Spring always reminds me of a really good adventure story --- there's the angst of late winter, then the relentless build toward the climax, followed by the happily ever after period of warm weather, flowers, and bird song.  Right now, I feel like we're beginning the first tiny steps toward spring's peak.

In early January as the days lengthened, a few hardy birds began to sing.  I heard Great Horned Owls duetting from opposite hillsides, and the bright song of a cardinal pierced the cold air.  A month later, I was stunned to notice that the bluebirds had changed back into their brilliant summer plumage --- I'm afraid I just stopped what I was doing and stared for a while.

Last week, I hunted down a blooming Witch-Hazel, knowing full well that Witch-Hazel is a winter bloomer and not a sign of spring.  The American Hazel catkins that had sat on the branch all winter were starting to lengthen and soften, but were still far from full bloom.

On my farm, the honeybees came out for a cleansing flight in the midst of last weekend's balmy weather, and I even found them a quarter mile away in the woods.  Finally, Monday, I saw what all the fuss was about --- the first real spring flower was blooming in the yard.  Granted, speedwell is an alien invasive species, but at this stage of the spring adventure roller coaster, I have trouble minding.