spring at Blithewold

First frog sighting of spring!

Last weekend Nancy and I spent hours and hours at Blithewold enjoying the amazingness of this early spring. Hordes of dark-eyed juncos flitted around among the newly arrived red-winged blackbirds. Black-capped chickadees were everywhere doing the spring fee-bee call. Sometimes they mixed in on the same shrubs with the juncos just the way they do in winter. The most fun sighting we had was a very active red-bellied woodpecker. We heard it first and weren't sure what it was. I don't think I'd ever heard one before. It sounded a bit like a cross between a northern flicker and a pileated woodpecker. I finally found it in a dead tree (where else?) drumming away and stopping to call every once in a while. I got A+ looks and just enjoyed watching it.

Mini-daffs!

Skunk cabbage was coming up everywhere. The mini-daffs were in bloom. We even found one full-sized daffodil in bloom already. At this rate, I'll bet the daffodils peak before the scheduled Daffodil Days starting April 10. There were even frogs peeking up out of the water garden ponds already. Spring has definitely busted out all over Blithewold. In places, the grounds are still very wet from the flooding so my shoes got really muddy, but who cares? It's spring.

Skunk Cabbage

Green Frog

Irises