April gave us some beautiful days — perhaps too many. Down East Maine needs rain and plenty of it, if it is to avoid a summer drought. Yet, there were only a handful of good rainstorms. Nonetheless, our fields, streams, woods, and sea coast did make a good showing in the April sun.
The April showers and a few snow flurries that we did get grounded our seagulls for a while. However, the droplets encouraged daffodils and forsythia to start our cold spring with bright yellow hues and our star magnolia trees to bloom into white pom-poms. The rains were enough at times to flood our bogs and help the important flora there to emerge, including skink cabbage and ferns.
We also had some very windy April days, with gusts in the 40-mile-an-hour range. If you were light enough, you could defy gravity by leaning into them.
The winds had our fishing vessels tugging at their moorings. They hunt scallops in April; some with booms and dredges, some smaller vessels only needed an outboard motor for aqua lung divers to hand-harvest “divers’ scallops.”
There were, of course, very still days when everything seemed perfect and ready for spring.
As for April wildlife, we can’t ignore old robin redbreast, one of the signs of spring. However, the return of our nesting pair of ospreys, Ozzie and Harriet, was the highlight of the month for us. Other birds of interest were loons in the sea and wood duck in the pond. One notable event was the early emergence of two painted turtles.
Finally, April had a super moon — literally and figuratively. The April Pink Full Moon was at its closest to earth when it appeared late in the month, hence it was a “super moon.” It’s called the Pink Full Moon because it appears when pink phlox does.
(All images in this post were taken in April 2021 in Down East Maine.)