1 week Ago
It warmed up a little by this weekend but I doubt anyone will forget our recent frigid weather. The lowest our thermometer went was 7 below zero. The curled rhododendron leaves that the plants use as protection from extreme cold didn’t uncurl for the entire week.
During the cold spell I, like most other people, stayed inside. I watched more TV than usual, but I also reread some of the magazines lying around. And in one I found an article about a seed found in a cave in the Judaean Desert in the 1980s.
I won’t plagiarize the article except to say that the somehow the seed’s age was determined to be 1,000 years old. Eventually it germinated and now it’s a 10-foot-tall, 14-year-old tree whose identity is unknown because it never flowered or produced fruit. Then, in a different but equally strange article, I read that lepidopteran (moths and butterflies) scientists have reported that some plants emit distress sounds when they’re stressed, under attack, or suffering from environmental conditions like drought.
And, according to the article, some moth species pick up on these ultrasonic sounds and use them to decide what plants they want to use for oviposition. I won’t say anything more about that heavily documented article. But it made me wonder how much else goes on in the world that we don’t know about.
After reading about plants making sounds, I went outside and walked around to feel the snow under my feet and come back to reality. We got 5 inches of snow which, based on the 10:1 ratio of snow to water, translates to only about half an inch of moisture. But considering how dry it’s been, any kind of moisture is welcomed.
There were animal tracks everywhere I walked, although it was impossible to determine what animal made some of them because of the dry fluffy snow that bastardized their prints and sizes. Some of them, like the obvious white-tailed deer tracks showing the drag marks of their toes behind their feet as they walked, were easy. But most of them were not.
When there’s more moisture in the snow it doesn’t melt for a long time, it’s heavier, and tracks stay intact for a long time. However, that wasn’t the case with this snow. Surprisingly, one night after the snow, we suddenly smelled a striped skunk outside, and David looked out and saw where it was.
But, if there were any of its five-toed prints left in the snow, I couldn’t find them. Cat tracks were abundant and easy to pick out. They, unlike those of canines like dogs and coyotes, don’t show the claw marks from their four toes.
Also, most likely there were some coyote tracks somewhere in the yard, but the blowing snow either covered them up or changed them. And of course there were gray squirrel tracks everywhere, with the distance between marks averaging about 2 feet. There are always squirrel tracks in the snow around here, regardless of where you live.
So after my short stint in the snow I went back inside, warmed up, and picked up a nursery catalog. And 35 pages of beautiful daylilies made me imagine how warm it will be when they’re growing. more lehigh valley outdoors news Our journalism needs your support.
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