Seasonal Highlights
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Spring Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Fresh pale green of new emerging leaves
- White blooms of flowering dogwood, common serviceberry, mayapple, Solomon’s plume, hairy sweet-cicely, mapleleaf viburnum
- Yellow blooms of tuliptree
- Occasional maroon blooms of pawpaw
- Greenish to purple hoods of Jack-in-the-pulpit
- Resident and migratory birds: eastern phoebe, eastern wood-pewee, wood thrush (listen for flute-like song), ovenbird (often on the forest floor), screech owl, barred owls, woodpeckers (such as red-bellied, pileated, downy, and hairy)
- Male white-tailed deer beginning their annual re-growth of bony antlers cloaked in velvet-covered skin
- Scentless, spotted newborn fawns, left to sleep unattended on the forest floor, while the doe forages for food, returning every few hours to nurse
Summer Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Shadiest time of year in the forest and easiest time to identify plants by leaves
- Ferns fully unfurled
- Tiny white blooms of broadleaf enchanter’s-nightshade
- Odd wine-colored blooms (late summer and fall) of beechdrops
- Occasional red berries of common serviceberry
- Birds most active at dawn and dusk; but listen for the red-eyed vireo’s song in the afternoon when most birds are quiet
- Gray squirrels (some black in color!) scrambling around the trees or forest floor, pausing frequently to feed Ecobit: When Black is Only Gray
- One or two spotted fawns trailing mother white-tailed deer, nibbling on leaves and nursing
Autumn Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Nuts (hard mast)—oak acorns, beechnuts, hickory nuts
- Colorful leaves—yellow American beech and tuliptree; red, purple and brown hues of oaks, red maple, and flowering dogwood; dark green Christmas fern and American holly
- Ribbony yellow blooms of American witch-hazel
- White blooms of white wood-aster
- Dark berries of mapleleaf viburnum
- Red berries of Jack-in-the-pulpit, flowering dogwood, American holly
- White wooly strings of the “Boogie-Woogie Aphid” on beech twigs (some years abundant) Ecobit: The Boogie Woogie Aphid
- Migratory birds heading south, feeding on the fruits of wild grapes, flowering dogwood and mapleleaf viburnum
- Male white-tailed deer scraping off the drying, peeling velvety antler covering on small trees or shrubs—revealing bone-white antlers, ready for mock battles of the mating season
Winter Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Tan leaves clinging to American beech trees amid spear-shaped, long buds of next season’s leaves
- Prickly dark green leaves of American holly, accented with red berries (popular with winter resident birds, and returning migrant birds in late winter/early spring)
- Brown and gray hues of twigs and bark with interesting textures
- Sword-like tan seeds of tuliptree
- Onion-shaped, fat flower buds of flowering dogwood tree
- Winter resident birds such as dark-eyed junco, Carolina chickadee, tufted titmouse, American robin, hairy woodpecker, pileated woodpecker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, downy woodpecker
- Male white-tailed deer sporting antlers—or not (shedding them in late winter)