First Snowdrops and a Rainbow

This was the first bunch of snowdrops I've seen this year, dotted with raindrops from the late afternoon showers we had on Friday. A little while later I drove my daughter to a friend's house on the eastern edge of town and had my breath taken away by my first rainbow of the season.

Loon in Northfield

This is the best shot I was able to get of the loon that has been spending time on the pond off Superior Drive in southeast Northfield -- probably one of the largest expanses of open water in the area, other than the river. This was taken a little after 7 p.m. on Friday. The bird was difficult to capture with the camera, as it was fishing out in the center of the pond and then when it had a fish it kept changing its position, trying to realign the fish for easier swallowing. It was not difficult to recognize -- larger than almost anything other than a goose, dark and low in the water, and with that long flat back. Through the binoculars we could easily see the diagnostic spotted back. Here is a little more about loons from the Cornell Ornithological Lab.

Mary and I briefly saw the loon on our walk earlier on Friday, after it was pointed out to us by a neighbor; thereafter it made itself scarce. The man commented that they have had loons there before and that his daughter had written all about one they'd seen for school but was told by her science teacher that it could not have been a loon and must have been a coot or something else. Well, loons may not spend much time here, but here is evidence, if a little blurry, that they certainly do indeed pass through as they follow open water north in the spring.

I've only been privileged to see loons on one occasion previously, during a lake vacation north of Bemidji almost seven years ago -- the occasion also of seeing my first bald eagle. After I'd been living in Minnesota for a while, I was startled to realize that the loon is the bird featured by another name in one of the Swallows and Amazons books, a classic British children's series of quite substantial novels by Arthur Ransome. As the child of British parents, I'd grown up reading and loving these books about capable children having independent sailing and camping adventures in the English Lake District and a few other locations between the World Wars. (You'll learn quite a bit about sailing, the Lake District, charcoal burners, mining, signalling, carrier pigeons and more if you care to take a look. Definitely recommended for about ages 9 and up!) The book in question, in which the children try to thwart a threatening egg collector who is after the nest of a rare breeding loon in the far northern British Isles, is called Great Northern? -- the name by which the Common Loon is known in Europe being the Great Northern Diver, which suits it very well indeed.

Ducks Galore

My friend Mary of My Northern Garden and I took a walk around the ponds at the southeast edge of town at midday today and found the wealth of ducks that I'd been promised. Naturally they moved steadily away from us as we neared, so all these shots are taken with the zoom and none are as clear as I'd like. Click on the photos for better detail. I was able to identify hooded mergansers (the males have the big white patches on their crests), a common merganser (large sleek duck with dark head and light body) and northern shovelers (multicolored ducks with distinctively long, heavy bills). I have been advised by my favorite birding expert that the light-bodied ducks in the top photo are scaups. As was noted in one of the comments to my previous post, many of these are just passing through on their way to more northerly breeding grounds. Enjoy them while you can!

Above: two male hooded mergansers, three scaup, two shovelers, and three female ducks, "n.o.s." (not otherwise specified).

Above: northern shovelers, male and female hooded mergansers, Canada geese

Above: male and female hooded mergansers and a scaup. Below, a common merganser.

Pied-billed Grebes

Last week I caught a glimpse of a small, slender-necked, duck-shaped bird on the river near Ames Park. This morning I was able to confirm that there are at least three Pied-billed Grebes there.


This small (perhaps two-thirds the size of a mallard) diving bird is recognizable by its chicken-like, light-colored bill.

I will keep an eye out for them and hope to have some better photos later. I am always delighted to discover something other than our typical mallards and Canada geese right here in central Northfield, and it would be wonderful if these birds choose this location for their breeding ground. Here are some more facts about the Pied-billed Grebe from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

• The Pied-billed Grebe is common on lakes and ponds across North America. It is rarely seen in flight. It prefers to escape predators by diving, and it migrates at night. However, it can fly, and stray individuals have reached Hawaii and Europe.
  
  
• Although it swims like a duck, the Pied-billed Grebe does not have webbed feet. Instead of having a webbing connecting all the toes, each toe has lobes extending out on the sides that provide extra surface area for paddling.

• The downy chicks can leave the nest soon after hatching, but they do not swim well at first and do not spend much time in the water in the first week. They sleep on the back of a parent, held close beneath its wings. By the age of four weeks, the young grebes are spending day and night on the water. For the first ten days their response to danger is to climb onto a parent's back. After that, when danger threatens, they dive under water.

After Snow, Seeds...

I'm getting ready to begin the gardening season by starting some seeds inside. With the long cold winter we've had and Monday's heavy, wet snow, the ground outside won't be ready to be worked for a while yet. You've probably read how to test whether the soil is ready: scoop a handful of soil up in your hand and squeeze it. If it sticks together (or worse, drips), it's too wet to be worked and you'll just damage the soil structure by trying. When the soil crumbles in your hand like chocolate cake, then you can start turning over your garden beds and thinking about planting your early spring crops like lettuce and peas.

Back in February when we were freezing our buns off, I ordered some seeds as an act of hope. Some of these, like lettuce, chard and cucumbers, are plants I can eventually -- either in the spring or later when the soil is good and warm, depending on the plant -- sow directly in my patio pots or the bit of additional in-ground garden space I hope to be borrowing this year. But in our short northern growing season, heat-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers must be started indoors so that they can avoid the cold, stunting soil of spring but still bear plenty of ripe fruit before the first frosts of fall.

At my former house, there was a fluorescent shoplight apparatus in the basement that I used to start seeds under. You need good strong lights (fluorescents, not hot ones that will fry the seedlings) just inches above the young plants, so that they grow strong and bushy, not tall and leggy reaching for the light, and you need to be able to raise the lights to accommodate the growing seedlings -- or to be able to lower the plants, as I did, to accomplish the same thing. I had my seed trays on top of a stack of boxes and old books, and I'd just remove a supporting layer occasionally as the plants grew.

In the lovely old house I lived in before that, we had big south- and west-facing windows with wide cast-iron radiators under them, coming almost up to the sills. The warmth of those radiators and the good light made quite a decent seed-starting set-up, as long as I remembered to turn the trays often so the plants would grow more or less straight.

Where I live now, there's nothing like either of those arrangements available, so I've splurged (I mean, made an investment that will pay off in the currencies of both food and happiness) and ordered a neat little freestanding, height-adjustable seed starting light fixture with a zippy name: the Jump Start 4' Grow Light System. I shopped around a little and found one of the better prices at 4SeasonGreenhouse.com. It features AgroBrite full-spectrum fluorescent tubes, said to offer "sun-like light with great value and efficiency"!

It's not here yet, but I'm hoping to set it up in a corner somewhere where it won't get bumped but where it's in sight so my kids and I can watch those first tiny shoots unfurl, develop their first true leaves, and grow into sturdy little plants that will thrive when I can finally move them outside in late May or June.