We’ve had a mild, sunny few weeks (give or take a few showery days) and we listened for peepers for a few nights before we heard them on April 13: a very average date for the last 10 years after a pretty middle-of-the-road winter. I need to do some more research on average daily temperature and/or humidity to figure out what triggers their awakening.
Previous peep dates:
2011 – April 12
2012 – April 12
2013 – April 20
2014 – April 15
2015 – May 2 (year of the massive snowfall)
2020 – April 13
Walking along the Bay to Bay Trail between Hawthorne and Fauxburg we stopped to listen to the wood frogs in a marsh on April 10. This is the first year we remember hearing so many of the “quacking” frogs. (We hear bull frogs all the time in the summer, but from now onwards we will listen out for the distinctive wood frogs in spring.) I took some video and posted it to Facebook, but I can’t upload video to my Word Press account, so here’s a YouTube link that sounds just like the chorus we heard: Wood Frogs
Frog spawn from the Dynamite trail, mid-April:
And on April 14 the daffodils were out and these little blue flowers were blooming. I stopped to look at them and spotted this bright metallic green bee — which I think was a Western hemisphere sweat bee (Agapostemon). They are ground nesters and this one seems to be a male (the females are green all over). There’s more information on them in this link to the Canadian Wildlife Federation. I’ve never seen one before: beautiful!
witches whiskers 