If April showers are any indication of how many May flowers we’ll be brought , we’re going to be up to our necks in flowers soon. This April was one of the wettest and windiest on record. We saw spring rains that were veritable car washes, high winds that were tree stranglers, roads turned to mush that required regrading, and that peculiar mix of fog and drizzle that is just plain oppressive.
However, the sunny side of this April was wonderfully exuberant. There were days to fly kites, watch clouds race, and otherwise experience the joy of a life on a clear day near the sea.
Aside from a few blow-downs, the woods remained inviting and the rain-swollen streams provided music that ranged from the melodic to the manic.
Aprils always begin with anxiety for me until I know that “my ospreys” have migrated safely to their nearby nest. Thankfully, they arrived on schedule this year.
Other winged migrators arrived before the ospreys this year — some were massive (Canada geese), some medium-sized (red-winged blackbirds), and some miniscule (eastern [“yellow”] palm warblers). Impressive as these visitors were, when it came to feathered flamboyance, they were no match for our male wild turkeys, which begin to feel their spring hormones in April.
Some of our returning wildlife in April didn’t come from the south, but appeared from the depths of local ponds and earthen shelters. We saw our first-of-the-year painted turtles and American toads during the month.
Our white-tailed deer and red squirrels are active year-round residents, of course, but their coats were thinning and changing colors in April.
On the working waterfront, the Atlantic scallop fishing season ended in April. The fishing vessels that dredged (‘dragged”) for these mollusks over the winter soon will be taking down their masts and booms, cleaning up, and getting ready to start hauling lobster traps in late May or June. Some vessels that spent the winter under wraps “on the hard” emerged like hibernators in April to undergo spring cleaning and maintenance.
In the April woods, the male red maple tree blossoms appeared as small, red pollen sprinklers; the speckled alder catkins hung like dormant insects dispensing pollen; white star magnolia buds started to show, and green needle-bundles burst from tamarack (larch) tree branches.
In the April bogs, the skunk cabbage leaves began to swirl up and furl out; a previously unseen yellow-white form of skunk cabbage spathe was found, and fern stems started to emerge like little groups of happy mummies, their fronds rolled tightly into fiddlehead-shapes.
In the gardens, the earliest flowers of the year were yellow and white: the forsythia and white star magnolia petals appeared before their bushes’ leaves emerged, as usual. And, of course, April daffodils (jonquils) arose and stood ready to blow their fancy horns if and when there was need for the alarm.
Finally, we come to April’s shadowy dusks and dark nights — often cold, often wet, and often dramatic. At times, an April dusk arrives with cobalt-colored clouds sliding slowly overhead and sealing off the last light above the sea.
This year, we were lucky to see a virtually-full April moon rise and silhouette the emerging red and pink blossoms at the tops of maple trees. This seemed fitting, since the April full moon is known as the pink full moon because it arises when pinkish flowers emerge.
(All images in this post were taken in Downeast Maine during April of 2023.)