Sunday, April 15, 2007
On a typical mid-April day in southern Maine, flowers would be blooming, butterflies fluttering and bees buzzing. Even the first peepers might be peeping by now.
No one needs to be told this is no typical April. Especially not the birds and bees. Or the lobsters, or the frogs.
The stubborn chill and unusual series of spring snowstorms are shaking up natural rhythms, forcing animals to adapt, leave or sit tight and wait. Nature is used to the unusual, of course, and a wintry April is not unprecedented. But forecasts of continuing cold and possibly more snow today and Monday could put a lot of critters to the test.
"We need some warm weather. Just one warm day," said Tony Bachelder, a Bucksport-based beekeeper with 700 hives around the state. "Usually, the bees start bringing pollen in by the last week of March and they haven't had a day yet."
Bachelder hasn't even unwrapped his hives because the cold could kill the bees, or at least slow down the bees' process of laying eggs and hatching. Hives that don't get pollen at this time of year will produce smaller, weaker bees, and nobody who likes flowers or apples wants that.
Bees have generally eaten up all their winter honey stores by now. Bachelder has been feeding the bees an unusual amount of sugar -- delivered to the hives as home-made sheets of hard candy -- to keep them from starving. But the insects have got to get out of the hives soon to clean their systems and bring pollen back to the hatchlings, he said.
"We just need one 65-degree day and the bees would be happy, and I would, too," he said.
Bachelder and his bees are not alone.
Many of the birds that arrive each spring are venturing into Maine despite the weather. Robins have been here for weeks, congregating where the sun has melted the snow so they can search for food. And male red-winged blackbirds have arrived to stake out territories for when the females arrive.
Tom Hodgman, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, said some birds seem to be staying to the south, waiting for the weather to break so they can forage. On the other hand, he has seen a harrier, kestrel, gray-blue heron, snowy egret and osprey.
Even the woodcocks have arrived, though they're lying low and finding shelter. While conditions are definitely not right for a lot of singing or dancing to attract mates, they also need to conserve energy. Finding worms to eat is even more important to woodcocks than it is to robins, which have a more flexible diet.
"If we get a little bit warmer weather and some bare ground we'll hear them singing," Hodgman said.
Birds can generally wait out a spring snowstorm. And, while some species have been known to freeze when they come north too soon, they can retreat for a brief southern vacation if the winter freeze doesn't break.
"They have the ability to pull out if they need to and come back a week or so later," he said. "Once we start losing the snow they're going to start coming back in."
Of course, flying isn't as easy as it looks, and the birds are probably getting hungry.
"They probably are just toughing it out," said Herb Wilson, a biology professor at Colby College. "Trying to retrace their migration is going to be expensive (in energy terms) and I don't think they have the food reserves to do it."
April's wintery weather is not likely to disrupt nesting and egg laying by most birds, assuming spring-like conditions really are somewhere around the corner. "Most of the ones that are likely to be affected are not going to be nesting for another three or four weeks," Wilson said.
But one high-profile bird, the bald eagle, is among the early nesters and appears to be having a tough spring fertility-wise.
Eagles start laying their eggs in March, which this year was about when winter conditions really kicked in. The cold and the snow this spring may result in a drop in the number of new eaglets this year. The eggs generally start hatching in early April if they've incubated successfully.
The spring of 1982 was similarly cold and snowy, and the number of babies dropped that year, said Charlie Todd, an eagle expert and state wildlife biologist. "I think this one has the potential to match or exceed that," Todd said.
He and other biologists have been flying over eagle nests across the state conducting an annual spring survey. After the heavy April 6 snowstorm, it was hard to even see some eagle nests while flying directly over them in a small plane, he said. Many of the nests appeared to have been left uncovered by eagles, a sign that the eggs did not survive the weather.
"Several nests looked like a bagel -- a big ring of snow with a melted-out spot where the eagle was sitting on eggs, and now there's no eggs," Todd said.
The biologists are not officially counting chicks yet, for good reason.
A pair of eagles in Hancock County that are the subjects of a 24-hour Web cam (www.briloon.org) appeared to have lost their eggs to the cold weather, too, until the fuzzy head of a chick appeared in the nest on Thursday.
Proof again, that nature is resilient.
Perhaps Maine's biggest spring wildlife migration, and also its least visible, is basically on hold right now because of the weather.
Salamanders and frogs are burrowed beneath the leaf litter in the forest floor, dormant but ready to emerge and crawl to vernal pools to breed and lay eggs. The annual migration, known as the Big Night, usually takes place right about now, whenever a heavy spring rain falls during a night when temperatures stay above 40 degrees.
While birds are more motivated by the expanding hours of daylight, "the amphibians are pretty closely tied to temperature and precipitation," said Phillip DeMaynadier, another IF&W biologist.
"We're certainly later than average." And, DeMaynadier said, "With what's forecast, we're certainly going to get pushed back."
The amphibians can simply wait it out and breed a little later in the season, he said. They would have been in much more trouble had they emerged on a warm night and then got exposed to the snow and cold.
Another weather-related migration that few people see takes place this time of year on the ocean floor off the Maine coast.
Lobsters usually crawl out of burrows and forage for food, and then move toward shore as water warms. But colder ocean temperatures have slowed them down, too.
And, when lobsters are not eating and crawling, they're not trapping. That's a big reason why the price of a Maine lobster dinner is now higher than anyone can remember. Live lobsters are now selling for about $15 a pound.
"We've been out and not catching very much," said Jodie Jordan, owner of Alewive's Brook Farm in Cape Elizabeth, which sells fresh lobsters as well as fresh vegetables.
A lobsterman might spend a day checking 200 traps and bring home 40 pounds of lobster, less than half a normal haul for this time of year.
As for Jordan's vegetable farm, that's starting to fall behind schedule, too.
"We had stuff in the ground this time last year," he said last week. "Years ago, we always transplanted lettuce during school vacation."
There won't be any planting in the fields this week. It hasn't even been possible to turn the soil in most of the fields, he said.
But farmers, just like all the critters waiting for spring to finally break, tend to adapt and survive, he said. As long as spring does, eventually, get here.
"Always has," Jordan said. "Hopefully it will."
Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:
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By the way, did you know that the chairman of the Nobel committee are buddies? He was in Oslo a few weeks ago presenting his "the planet has a fever" speech, and the committee chairman was right there in the front row.
Only someone as pompous as Algore would lobby for the award!
How does one connect the dots between global warming and peace, anyway? What is that connection? I don't see it.
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ridiculous.report abuse
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