Easter Eggs
Also woodcocks, wood frogs, coltsfoot and a few other April visitors.
The Hidden Pond turned three in March! If you are a new subscriber or want to upgrade to paid, check out my birthday offer. It’s good until April 12.
I have a plethora almost of ideas rolling around in my head. I even have sentences committed to paper, but they need to be developed further before I post about them. Besides, it’s Easter Sunday for those who celebrate, and some of you will have eggs to hunt for.
Here, on this rainy day, even the coltsfoot’s flowers stay closed up, waiting for the sun to shine again. The wood frogs are not shy, so I am going to resurrect a post about them dated about this time last year. I’ll follow that with “Welcome Happy Morning,” a post from Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024. Inside that is another post from April 5, 2023, “Getting Things Right,” about woodcocks. Easter eggs.
“In those days Spring came early, so that when Easter fell on March 31 there would already be crocuses and daffodils in bloom around the house, and mourning doves combing last year’s grasses for seeds. The Easter bunny had hidden the very eggs we’d dyed the day before, and we were out with our baskets looking for them down in the leaf litter and up along the window ledges we were too short to reach. A Kentucky cardinal sang from the shrubs nearby . . . .”
And from the woodcock’s p.o.v:
“It’s a kinda grey day outside, but last night I heard the first woodcock. Since I’ve heard them as early as February some years, I imagine they’ve been back for a while but yesterday was warm and the moon waxes full tonight, so it’s time for the males to make their crazy peent peent sounds and do their spiraling courtship dance . . . .”
Happy Hunting! And ignore the bit at the end of the earlier posts about paid archives. That’s a thing of the past. All posts are free now and forever more.
Post script: Coltsfoot, tussilago farfara, might fool you into thinking it’s a dandelion. But it isn’t and besides, it’s the first thing to bloom here at the Hidden Pond. Unlike the dandelion that is all leaves first then flowers, the leaves of the coltsfoot, shaped like a hoof print, appear after the blooms, and then the plant goes on sending out rhizomes wherever there’s soil that needs improving. Or gravel that given time could become soil. Wiki claims “the leaves wither and die in early summer.” Not true. They keep right on sneaking through the lavender and along the raised beds, only to die with the frost. I will leave them until spring when I clear them off the gravel because I do want gravel, not soil, in the parts around the deck.
Wiki’s information on coltsfoot lives here.
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