May arrived and disappeared like an owl, swooping through on silent wings. If you weren’t paying attention, it might seem like it wasn’t even there.
April’s sea of green continued to deepen in the woods, with floors of ferns, dense and rich, and opportunistic branches reaching into the trails. The trilliums changed from white into pink, then purple, then all green again as they went to seed. In the gardens, there was a riotous rainbow of colour. The frogs sang. The owlets flew clumsily from branch to branch, chirping for their parents to feed them.
As some babies fledged, new nests popped up, sometimes in inconvenient places. I hope the unwise Junco that has laid her eggs just outside my front door is able to brood them and doesn’t flush from the nest every time we enter or leave the house!
May felt overwhelmingly full of life. The mornings were greeted with birdsong that had me reaching for the Merlin app to try to learn new calls. Over in the beaver pond, an adventurous duckling explored solo, a ball of fluff on the tannin-stained water.
In May it’s hard to imagine the world NOT being green. The mosses were still damp and lush, though the licorice ferns are now shriveled and gone, their rhizomes waiting for next fall. I was likely to find a banana slug or two on my wanders, and I always pause to watch them.
At school, the spring weather invited exploration in the zones near water, both river and beach. We focused on how to collect and interpret data, and found many macroinvertebrates and a few salmon fry! One Forest School day we spotted some folks in the stream so paused to find out what they were doing - I learned lots about lampreys, and am excited to learn more!
At the beach, the students discovered the wonders of the intertidal zone. Fat starfish made me happy, though some still showed signs of the wasting disease that devastated their population. This spring’s surprising discovery for me was barnacle molts, something I’d read about in my research for my barnacle story, but had never seen before! Of course it seems like once you know something exists, you find it everywhen, not knowing it’d been there all along!
May was poetry and popsicles, blossoms turning to seeds, and late, cool evenings of beauty.
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