I spent a good part of the past two days up at Carol’s parents’ house in Westford, Mass. There’s a small wooded wetland right next to their house, and Friday in the late afternoon a chorus of frogs sang very loudly. (Actually, it wouldn’t be accurate to say they sing: the sound is something between a small dog barking and a Mallard duck quacking.) I’m not sure what kind of frog those are, but those were the only frogs I heard last night. And then this evening there were three or four spring peepers adding their voices to the chorus.<\/p>\n
There’s a small pond a quarter of a mile away from the house; not a natural pond, but a constructed pond that a developer built in front of some condos. Yesterday Carol and I went for a walk around this pond, and she pointed out for me where sunfish had made nests. There were perhaps half a dozen of these nests, depressions in the sandy bottom near the edge of the pond, about ten inches across and several inches deep. She said that last week she saw a little Bluegill guarding each nest, but we didn’t see any fish there yesterday.<\/p>\n
Driving up to Westford from New Bedford yesterday and this morning, I took I-495 most of the way. Perhaps I didn’t notice yesterday, but driving up today I realized that a few willow trees were starting to bloom. All the other trees are still a wintry gray, but a few willows had turned a straw-yellow color.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent a good part of the past two days up at Carol’s parents’ house in Westford, Mass. There’s a small wooded wetland right next to their house, and Friday in the late afternoon a chorus of frogs sang very loudly. (Actually, it wouldn’t be accurate to say they sing: the sound is something between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}