Signs of Spring

Click on the comments to see all the great submissions from readers on 3/15/2010.

From Ginny Lang, Bellingham, WA
Last week I was walking Coco, our enthusiastic German Shorthair Pointer, and she was enjoying the smells in our neighborhood, wagging and wiggling as she nosed the ferns and ground cover and watched, very carefully, the fat robins in the yards. I’m never quite sure who is the walker and who is the walkee, but I’m pretty sure Coco knows. We live in the hills above Bellingham, WA and Lake Whatcom so it’s about 8 to 10 degrees cooler up here than in town down by the Bay. There, we’re seeing daffodils and forsythia in full bloom – earlier than usual – and the cherry blossoms are glorious already. Up here, the forsythia is just beginning to show yellow flowers and I’ve noticed little red buds on the salmon berry trees. The tulips are showing their tips above the ground and it looks like they will bloom well before their usual April arrival.

As we walked, I began to hear a racket. This wasn’t a scolding squirrel, circling crow or an airplane over the lake…it sounded like metal on metal, and it was close. Coco heard it too, and we headed back toward our house and the unusual sound.

There on the dead end sign was a woodpecker, pecking for all he was worth on the bottom corner of the sign. Trying to attract the ladies, I’d suspect. I laughed and got out the camera. Coco pointed. All sorts of puns, practically limericks, come to mind about this fellow’s effort to attract a mate: his big….sound…. ringing through the woods, the age old woodpecker equivalent to a dating site. He’s been back, so I guess he’s checking to see if there have been any responses to his posting.

From Jane Grant in Baltimore, Maryland.

A photo from a hike in the woods along the Gunpowder River in central Maryland on January 18, 2010. In my zone, Skunk Cabbage is due to appear in February, but I found these a bit earlier, poking up through the leaf litter in the otherwise brown, bare woods. A beautiful sign of Spring!