February picnic, vernal pools, and vitamin D

Sometimes, you have to make the best of a snowless winter. We caved in last week and had a picnic. And we didn’t even have to bring dishes; there was plenty of the finest crystal around.

It was lots of fun — at least, till it stopped being fun altogether and degenerated into one daughter coming down with a virus, a lost water bottle, the sun retreating under clouds for a nap, and general grumpiness. It happens sometimes — thankfully not very often.

Today was different. We went to visit a vernal pool at a different preserve. It’s a place where spotted salamanders emerge from their cover each spring and lay eggs, sometimes hundreds or thousands. A vernal pool is more like a low spot, or a miniature wetland, that dries up after the spring rains and stays dry till winter. This particular one is apparently favored by spotted salamanders and red efts, as well as wood frogs and spring peepers.

We didn’t see any eggs there; even in this weird warm winter, it’s early.

We moved along toward the pond, and on the way there we saw a beaver dam and lodge.

That must be the beaver equivalent of steel-beam construction. We passed through an awe-inspiring beaver lumberyard choked with felled trees (as well as some shredded porcupine trees — one of these days we’ll see the culprit!), and arrived at the pond. We saw no tree sparrows, kingfishers, or muskrats, as we have in the past. But we saw plenty of Canada geese as well as several talkative people who walked there often and had seen for themselves, on other occasions: a fisher eating apples, an owl, and a pileated woodpecker.

We saw none of these marvels, but we did see a few red spotted newts. They apparently start in the water as larvae, then live on land as red efts, then return to the water as adults.

On the whole, it was a satisfying grab for some sunlight — sunlight that’s not predicted to return till Sunday. I’m hoping it won’t turn out that way, but if so, at least we filled our tanks with some solar good cheer today.

Even the hawks seemed to be basking.