(02/18/2010) It just started to snow. It’s been a winter to write home about. Fort Pond, Chatfield’s Hole, and Town Pond have been frozen solid for weeks. Nonetheless, the newly mated pair of swans on Town Pond are hanging
 Durell Godfrey
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around, rather than finding open water as the area’s other 40 or 50 swans do at this time of year. They were there Valentine’s Day. Love conquers all, they say.
The assorted South Fork tidal creeks and harbors are half-frozen. Snow has covered the ground for several weeks, except for a few days between repetitive snowstorms. The snowstorm on Feb. 10 was accompanied by gale-force northeast winds, which literally pasted the wet snow on the northeast sides of the tree trunks.
As of Presidents Day, the sides of many boles were white from the ground to 10 to 15 feet up. The weight of the wet snow bent many a branch to the ground, and a few of the small pitch pines in my yard still have crowns touching the earth held down by frozen snow, their trunks forming a kind of bowed ankh.
The daylight hours are getting noticeably longer, and I can almost tell the color of the vehicles passing my house in both directions during the 6 o’clock evening traffic count. As February progresses, dawn breaks earlier and dusk comes later. The longer photoperiod activates our pineal gland to get us into the swing of things, some of us more than others.
The pineal glands of songbirds are situated under a translucent, thinnish skull, and so they get going faster than ours. The testosterone flows, and thoughts of migration dominate the minds. The spring birds will begin arriving shortly, while the birds that winter here, like the juncos and white-throated sparrows, are thinking about moving farther north.
Robins and flocks of blackbirds will be among the first to arrive. The robins that have been occupying the line of scraggly privets between Noyac Road and the house for the last few days are winter robins. Their pantries are running low; privet berries are not their favorites, but that may be all that is left.
The starlings are with them. I imagine the two intermingling species have been hedge-hopping for the last week or so. There aren’t that many hedges in Noyac, but there are a lot of Eastern red cedars with lots of juniper berries. It was a good fruiting year for trees and shrubs, one of the best in a long time. The abundant winterberry holly berries on both sides of the Napeague isthmus have been dazzling since last November.
It’s hard to put a shovel in the ground. The roots of all of the perennial wildflowers — the asters and the goldenrods — must be nearly frozen solid, but, come the March thaw, they’ll be pushing up new stems with new leaves. It happens every year, no matter the severity of the winter. It’s the difference between them and annuals. The latter have to take their chances on last fall’s seeds germinating from an earthy perch. Their next generation is not guaranteed.
If it weren’t for the tunneling of voles, what would the salamanders and spring peepers do? They sit quiet underground until the ice filling the microscopic interstices of the upper soil layers starts melting and the insides of the tunnels become wet. Then, they start thinking about getting a wiggle on and finding the way to the nearest hole of fresh water, from which, only a generation or two ago, they crawled out at the beginning of summer, when life on land and in the bushes and trees first began for them.
Last year’s vole count was extraordinarily high. Will that translate into lots of amphibians? We’ll have the answer in three or four weeks.
Keep an eye out for the first ospreys to make it back to their nests. The ones that use the platform nests scattered at the edge of Accabonac Harbor’s marshes are among the first to arrive each year. They time their appearance to coincide with the annual alewife run. There used to be millions of alewives moving up local streams to spawn, say, in Scoy Pond, Stepping Stones Pond, Hook Pond, and Big Reed Pond. They still come into Georgica Pond and Sagg Pond when their guts are opened, and some manage to make it up Ligonee Brook each spring to Long Pond south of Sag Harbor.
The run that seldom fails and is perhaps the largest on Long Island is the one from North Sea Harbor to Big Fresh Pond in North Sea. Only 60 years ago, there were more than 1,000 osprey pairs breeding on eastern Long Island, but now there are fewer than 100. As the alewife schools waned, so went the osprey. DDT also had a lot to do with it.
Enjoy these last few weeks of winter as one season passes and another emerges. I only miss it when it’s over.