April Signatures

By Ed Wesely

Spring pools. The poet Robert Frost has described the way spring pools—filled with snow melt and spring rain—serve as mirrors, reflecting the April sky through lattices of bare branches.

But here, as in Frost’s New England, the onset of fresh foliage will siphon away their water. As Frost put it in a short poem, spring pools “will like the flowers beside them soon be gone, / And yet not out by any brook or river, / But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.”

I’ve forgotten how many gallons of water a hardwood tree “drinks” each day when its leaves mature, but I’ve watched the effect at a spring pool at the edge of our property.

	TRR photo by Ed Wesely Wood frog eggs that appeared in our pond on April 10. Each black egg is bound with dozens of look-alikes in a jelly-like matrix. From egg to juvenile frog takes about 85 days. (Click for larger image)

Wood frogs, with a swelling chorus of tiny tree frogs (“spring peepers”) own that pool this week, but will soon return to forest homes—gambling on enough stability in the pool to give their eggs and tadpoles a chance to resist predators and desiccation.

The built-in maxims of wood frogs and spring peepers seem to be: “Let’s get this work done before it gets hot, and the trees drink dry our pool.” It’s also safer to migrate through the forest in late winter, and by choosing temporary pools, both species avoid encounters with resident fish and snapping turtles.

Spring peepers. A reader asked me if wood frogs were the same as “spring peepers.” The answer is no, but because peepers are so tiny, the best way to identify the two species is by their calls.

Wood frogs are two and a half inches long, and a bunch of them sound like a chorus of quacking ducks.

The average peeper can fit on a 50-cent piece, but its high-pitched “peep” may carry hundreds of feet from a breeding pool. A chorus of peepers pulsates like sleigh bells.

“Loveliest of trees…” My favorite Easter poem, by Alfred Houseman (1859-1936), fits most Aprils if not this one. But in fair weather or foul his poem adds a grace note to the Easter season. (In the poem the term “woodland ride” means a bridle path.)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.