Although the weather appears to be warming, don’t be fooled: Late winter has arrived on the Illinois prairie.
The sun is rising a bit earlier each morning, and setting a bit later each evening. Frosty mornings still are common, but there are fewer of them in March, and the cold snaps aren’t quite as cold nor do they last as long.
In the early morning, as the sun begins to peek over the horizon, early risers among the birds wintering in the Fox Valley come out to feed. The woodpeckers – big hairies and smaller downies and the occasional red bellied (whose belly isn’t really red at all) – flit to the suet feeder and worry out their day’s ration of sunflower seeds layered in the fat.
Meanwhile at two post feeders, the snowbirds, the cardinals, the mourning doves, and the rest of the yard’s winter residents eat after flying in their regular routes. Each picks the same route each day, usually hopping from the locust tree to one of the feeders, although some will take a short detour to the soft maple overlooking the deck before deciding which feeder to choose.
After false dawn has fled and the real thing is well along, the gray squirrels come out to feed, with the grays always the first arrivals. Gray squirrels are relative newcomers to our river valley. A couple of decades ago, grays were unheard of; the big reddish brown fox squirrels were the only squirrels we saw.
But little by little, the smaller grays have moved to the woods along the river, apparently migrating down from the oak savannah now home to Windcrest Subdivision, feasting on the black walnuts from the trees and their descendants my great-grandparents planted a century and a quarter ago, and the acorns from the little stand of oaks overlooking our shade garden one of my cousins planted decades ago.
When the day has gotten well along, about 7 a.m. or so, the finches begin arriving, along with the rest of the birds that have come to know there is a good meal to be had in our backyard. Once in a while, a mallard or two will wander up from the river to snack on the seeds and hulls the squirrels and birds have dropped on the ground under the feeders. The big Canada geese come up from the river, too, these days now that the ice is well out of the river and there are plenty of easy escape routes from our resident coyotes and foxes.
In the morning when my wife fills the feeders, if a light snow has fallen during the night, the tracks of the other residents of our river valley are there to see. The tiny tracks of the occasional field mouse can be seen, especially under the seed feeder where the pickings can be pretty good. The tiny paw prints are nearly invisible, but trails left by the mice’s long tails centered between the two lines of tracks are sure giveaways.
The cottontail rabbits leave their tracks, too, clearly visible are the two short front paws and the two longer back paws, with the tracks deeper where the rabbit stopped to look around. There are plenty of dangers to watch for, ranging from the neighbor’s dog to my son’s cat from across the street to one of the foxes that, despite the area’s growing human population, still live in their dens along with the coyotes we see wandering along the river bank.
Raccoons wander about at night, too, and with spring coming on, they leave their winter hideouts more and more often. They like to stay along the river where food’s more plentiful, and their startlingly human-like prints can often be seen where they sampled some of the fallen seed, or carried away one of the slices of stale bread we put out.
Before we reinforced the feeders’ poles, raccoons and squirrels alike would work hard to bend the shepherd’s hooks we tried hanging the feeders from to get at all that great food, sometimes carrying away entire feeders. But we finally learned to outsmart the thieves – some of the time.
Pickings here along the river’s edge are pretty good this time of year for almost all of our wild neighbors. The raccoons and foxes that made it through the coldest, snowiest weather can find plenty of winter-kill to satisfy their appetites, from fish caught in the ice during quick freezes to ducks and geese that surrendered to exposure, predators, or old age during the winter.
The river that proved to be the death of so many animals during the coldest weather becomes life itself during the early spring. The warmer sunny days – even when temperatures stay below freezing – cause the ice to disappear, not so much melting as evaporating. As open water returns, the shallows snag the bodies of winterkills as they are pushed downstream by the current, and the winter residents that live by scavenging (meaning most of them) find it easier to rustle up a square meal.
The crows seem to spy the newest food first, but they’re joined fairly quickly by others, including mournful-looking turkey vultures. It’s also no longer uncommon to see a great Bald Eagle spiral down to run off the lesser scavengers to dine in regal solitude.
While the animal residents of the river valley are becoming increasingly active as the days grow longer, the trees and other plants are still in their winter mode, not exactly dead, but not really alive either.
The gnarled limbs of the valley’s oaks show starkly black against the vivid reds of a clear evening’s sunset, and it’s still several weeks until most early spring flowers will poke through the ground. But the sap is stirring in the valley’s sugar maples and the stems of other woody plants are turning red in preparation for budding out in a few weeks.
Early March isn’t spring in northern Illinois, but, as the saying goes, we can see it from here. As this Fox Valley winter plays its last few hands, we wait for the first signs of real spring.
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