March 2024

Since I didn't manage to write up February Nature Notes, I thought I would just include a few photos from February here.

February 8 frost

February 9 sunrise at the pond

February 14 Witch hazel at the Arb

February 15 From Susan

February 20 Getting ready for the solar eclipse

February 21 Iceman outside of Children's Hospital

February 24 Need I say more?

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Monday, March 4 One of the real pleasures of living close to the pond is seeing the early morning light on my morning walks. This glow on the trees on the western edge of the pond as the sun rose lasted only a few minutes.

Wednesday March 6 Croci blooming at the Arb.

Friday March 8 Spotted this hawk in a tree on our morning walk at the pond. It stayed put long enough for me to take a few photos.

Maddie has been declining over the last few weeks. She's been ok in the mornings and we've been going to the pond, but she loses steam as the day goes on. She's had several episodes of her back legs giving out and falling over. And over the last week she's had trouble with incontinence. After agonizing about her situation, I decided to have the vet come to the house today to put her to sleep. It was all peaceful and over quickly. She was a wonderful dog and great companion to Jeannie and me. After Jeannie retired in 2013, she trained Maddie to be a therapy dog and took her to memory care facilites in our neighborhood. Maddie loved all the attention and Jeannie loved doing a good deed. And I loved watching them head out the door in the morning to go on their visits. This photo is her official Harvard Business School portrait, taken by a HBS photographer, on one of her visits with Jeannie to the students at the business school library around exam time. I miss her very much.

Saturday March 9 Spent the morning at Plum Island about an hour north of Boston, right on the Atlantic, with a huge salt marsh behind the dunes. Big waves at the ocean - not a lot of duck action there.

The marsh was more flooded than usual, water everywhere. A couple dozen Northern pintails surface feeding at the salt pond, along with 6 beautiful green-winged teals, right at the edge of the water, by the road. As I was watching them from the car, a guy kneeled down right in front of my car with a lens that had to be 2' long. Guess he got some good photos.

At the next parking lot, quite a few different species: lots of red-breasted mergansers, two horned grebes that kept diving, a few buffleheads, looking spiffy in their white and black feathers, half a dozen gadwalls. I thought I saw a single common goldeneye but couldn't be sure. A couple of Northern harriers flew low over the treetops right above me. 

At the Hellcat Dike, a couple of guys were looking very intently at something through their scope, so I wandered over to see what they were looking at. An American bittern!  But it was so well camouflaged at the edge of the tall reeds that I couldn't actually find it, even though they had the scope on it. After a few minutes of squinting through my binoculars, I saw it move slowly through the reeds.

Sunday March 10 Walked along the Emerald Necklace to Rt 9 this morning. At Jamaica Pond, 1 female common merganser by itself and 3 males together. At Ward's Pond, a small pond in a gully, a pair of mute swans were building a nest in the water, near a stand of reeds, kind of amazing. One was sitting on the nest they'd built so far and the other was breaking off reeds, presumably to add to it. Also a male hooded merganser and a couple of ring-necked ducks. Walking through the woods heard a red-bellied woodpecker calling and other woodpeckers drumming. And at Leveritt Pond, two pairs of common mergansers and three wood ducks. Pretty good for a morning city walk. And after my walk, in the shower, saw a red-tailed hawk soaring over the back yard.

Tuesday March 12 Spectacular sunrise over the pond.

And my neighbors' daffodils starting to bloom!

Wednesday March 13 Walking around Jamaica Pond this morning: pair of wood ducks  paddling about some fallen trees by the edge of the pond; pair of common mergansers still here; a single ruddy duck; perhaps a dozen or so buffleheads; and a single red-breasted merganser, I think the first I've seen all winter at the pond. And muskrats everywhere: swimming from the island towards the bank of the pond, then diving just as it reached the bank, presumably into a den; sitting on a fallen branch in the water, munching; swimming along the edge of the pond between the boathouse and Eliot St.

This afternoon, after an Audubon meeting at their headquarters at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, I went over to the farm to see the one week old lambs! Major cute!

Sunday March 17 Got an email from a staff member at Mass Audubon that another of the ewes had twin lambs this morning. Photo of them, still wet, just after being born.

Caroline Malone

Wednesday March 20 There's a single female common merganser left at the pond; the rest of the common mergansers and all the hoodies have been gone for a while now. Most days, I see a few ducks that are just passing through on their migration - half a dozen ruddy ducks one day; a few buffleheads another. Soon they'll all be gone.

Thursday March 21 At the ornithology collection at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, going over what photographs I'd like taken for my book (mostly eggs and bones). Here's a photo of some of their owls.

( Ornithology Department, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, © the President and Fellows of Harvard College)

 

 

Wednesday March 27 Jeannie's Christmas cactus continues to bloom.

Saturday March 30 Walking at Mass Audubon's Habitat sanctuary in Belmont (next to Cambridge) saw a bench with a marker in memory of the MIT economist, Paul Samuelson (1915-2009). with this quote from HL Mencken: "A professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas". I've seen this bench before, along one of the footpaths. But when I saw it today, it had been moved next to another bench with a plaque in memory of a Harvard psychologist, Jerome Kagan (1929-2021) with this quote "A professor must question his theory as a dog must lick his wounds". Both lived in Belmont.