Spring in Vermont
Kent McFarland
March has arrived in classic New England spring fashion this year. With rapid shifts between blistering cold and warm rainy days, this month is reminiscent of its eponymous Roman god, Mars. Being named after the god of war, March is a month of battles between warm and cold, between winter’s refusal to leave and spring’s insistence on coming. Follow this contest as it unfolds to an inevitable conclusion with these signs of spring.
By Nathaniel Sharp and Kent McFarland
Winter is marked by drab colors like whites and brown, but spring brings new bursts of color to brighten our lives. Keep an eye out for some of these welcome flashes of color:
The dandelion-like Coltsfoot is one of the first species to emerge along roadways when the snow melts away. This European native has the latin name “tussilago,” which is derived from the Latin tussis, meaning cough, and ago, meaning to cast or to act on, and harkens back to its traditional medicinal uses for respiratory illnesses like the flu and colds. But don’t run to grab a handful during your next illness; the discovery of toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids in the plant has resulted in concerns about liver health.
Speaking of liver, the native Sharp-lobed and Blunt-lobed Hepaticas can be found in the understory of deciduous forests. The word hepatica comes from the Greek word for “liver” because their three-lobed leaves were thought to look like the human organ. Make sure to look early as these attractive white, pink, purple, or blue spring ephemerals bloom early and only last a short time.
Be sure to add your sightings to iNaturalist along with notes about plant phenology using the annotations feature!
On bright sunny days in late March, you may see the season’s first butterflies emerging from crevices where they pass the winter months in a state of torpor. Species like the Milbert’s Tortoiseshell, Mourning Cloak, and Eastern Comma all use this strategy to survive the winter, and are the first butterflies to be seen out and about once the sun has warmed their wings. With no nectar to be found, these butterflies are instead on the hunt for mates and occasionally will stop by a wounded tree for a drop of sap. You can add all of your butterfly sightings to eButterfly.
By Kent McFarland and Julia Pupko
If you sniff a winter-themed candle, your nose might be delighted with hot chocolate, mulling spices, or woodsmoke from a cozy fire. But in the wild, the rightful scent of late winter is skunk.
The Striped Skunk wakes from torpor in March, armed with a teaspoon of odoriferous oil in its two anal glands and looking for love. While most mammals use their scent for communication, skunks usually uses their oil to ward off predators looking for a meal.
The scent-gland secretion is a yellow oil composed primarily of chemical compounds known as thiols. The smell of a thiol comes from a sulfur atom bonded to a hydrogen atom in its chemical structure, which produces the smell of garlic or rotten eggs. One thiol is ethanethiol (also called ethyl mercaptan), which is added to otherwise odorless propane gas to aid in the detection of leaks. Another thiol creates the “skunky” smell of beer after it has been exposed to ultraviolet light. While the thiols in skunk oil are not particularly smelly on their own, mix in a bit of water and suddenly you have an odoriferous skunk.
If you find yourself walking through a cloud of “skunk” this month without any evidence of our waddling black-and-white neighbors, it might actually be the pungent territorial urine markings of a red fox, again, from sulfur compounds including thiols. Some of these chemicals are unique to foxes, some are shared with skunks, and some of them actually come from plants.
These plant-derived chemicals are called apocarotenoids—like the carotenoids that color carrots—and in plants, they produce subtle smells to attract pollinators. Omnivorous foxes absorb apocarotenoids from plants in their diets and may use them to communicate good health to potential mates or enemies. The urine markings also contain information about the marker’s sex, age, dominance status and breeding status.
It’s not just animals that have all the smelly fun. One of our earliest spring flowers is Eastern Skunk Cabbage, which can melt through snow as early as February. They use a process called thermogenesis, which heats up the inside of their flowers to 75 ˚F. Skunk cabbages emerge before most pollinators, so they don’t have to worry about producing pretty colors or smells for butterflies and bees. In fact, they do just the opposite and produce a smell described as skunky, garlic-like, and putrid, attracting flies and carrion beetles to act as pollinators. Skunk cabbage should soon be sprouting from the ground in most parts of the state. If you see one, see if you can snap a picture of any insects visitors as an early season addition to Pollinator Interactions on Plants (PiP) on iNaturalist.
By Dana Williams
The end of March is a good time to start looking for hardy evergreen plants poking through the snow. Among these winter survivors are tiny forests of ankle-high “pine trees” commonly called “princess pine” or “creeping cedars”. Surprisingly, these lookalikes aren’t related to pine trees at all. They are actually part of an ancient class of plants called clubmosses. In their heyday, they shaded dinosaurs under 100-ft canopies, and when they died they were compressed into coal. Nowadays, these miniature forests spread through horizontal stems that run above or below ground. You can begin to identify common species by their above-ground forms.
Upright clubmosses stand up straight as a single stem or a stem that splits in two halfway up. The most common species in Vermont are Shining Firmoss and Interrupted Clubmoss.
Fan-shaped clubmosses look like miniature pine trees with a fan-like spread to their branches. Their leaves can be flat and scale-like as in the ground cedars or prickly as in the tree clubmosses.
Claw-like clubmosses have many forking, bushy branches that can look like fingers spreading across the ground. The most common species in Vermont is the Stag’s-horn Clubmoss.
There are a total of 24 species of clubmosses in Vermont, including the Green Mountain quillwort, a species discovered in 2010 as part of the Vermont Atlas of Life. You can add your sightings to iNaturalist or practice online by identifying the observations of others.
By Dana Williams
Tufted Titmouse, American Goldfinch, Northern Cardinal, Downy Woodpecker: this is a typical March eBird list from a backyard feeder in Vermont. But what’s common today has not always been so common in the state. In fact, some of our winter neighbors are pretty new to Vermont winters.
Tufted Titmouse
This gray and white bird with their familiar “peter peter peter” call used to be known as a southern species. In the early 1900s, they rarely reached farther north than New Jersey and Iowa. The tufted titmouse was first reported in Vermont in 1910, but even by 1978 only an average of 10 titmice were seen each winter. They weren’t reported as breeding in the state until 1975. Now these birds are relatively common throughout the year as warmer winters, bird feeders, and forest maturation have helped them spread throughout Vermont.
Northern Cardinal
This bright red bird has become a staple of winter scenes in New England even though they weren’t seen in Vermont until 1932. In 1955, the species was noted to be expanding northwards and by 1973 they were a common visitor to winter feeders. A total of three birds were sighted during the 1960-61 Christmas Bird Count. Ten years later, 72 birds were seen and by the 1980 count, the number had jumped to 245. Cardinals expanded along river valleys first and were likely aided by bird feeders along the way.
Carolina Wren
Carolina Wrens were considered southern vagrants and only occasionally seen in the state between 1935 and the 1970s. They struggle to survive during harsh winters, which may have kept them from settling in Vermont until 1977, when they were first recorded by the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas. While their susceptibility to cold has always kept their populations low in New England, warmer winters, thick ornamental shrubs around houses, and suet feeders have improved their survival. By the second Vermont Atlas (2003-2007), their range grew in southern Vermont and in Burlington. If you live in these regions, and increasingly elsewhere, you might get to hear a “teakettle teakettle teakettle” from these occasional winter feeder visitors. If you don’t have your own bird feeder to look for these newly wintering birds or track the arrival of our regular migrant birds, you can still follow along with the Cornell Lab Bird Cams on Youtube.
Want to learn more about historical species trends? Check out our records of Vermont Birds (1973 – 2001) or help expand our records by volunteering to transcribe historical bird records.
