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
- Pink or pinkish blooms of mountain laurel (late spring), pink azalea, hillside blueberry
- Red blooms of red maple, black huckleberry
- White blooms of flowering dogwood, common serviceberry
- Green moss with long thread-like appendages that support tiny spore-bearing fruiting bodies
- Migratory birds arriving or passing through
- Nesting birds setting up territories, building nests
- Veery calling in the middle of the day, when most other birds are quiet
- Gray squirrels feeding on the buds, flowers, or seeds of red maple Ecobit: When Black is only Gray
Summer Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Pink or pinkish blooms of mountain laurel (early summer)
- Red blooms of black huckleberry
- White blooms of striped prince's-pine, partridgeberry—low to the ground
- Dark berries of hillside blueberry, black huckleberry
- Red berries of common serviceberry
- Nesting birds actively collecting food for young birds. Baby birds learning to fly and following their parents around, begging for food
- Gray squirrels energetically flirting, chasing each other through the tree tops (very early summer; their second annual litter of 3-5 born in August or September in leaf or twig nest in crotch of tree)
Autumn Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Nuts (hard mast): oak acorns, beechnuts and occasional pine cones
- Striking color contrasts—Gray rock outcrops, dark soil, green moss, light gray or dark brown trunks, colorful leaves
- Yellow leaves of American beech, American witch-hazel
- Red and orange leaves of blackgum, red maple
- Purple and brown leaves of flowering dogwood, oaks
- Dark green leaves of mountain laurel, American holly
- Yellow blooms of American witch-hazel
- White blooms of white wood-aster
- Dark berries of mapleleaf viburnum, roundleaf greenbrier
- Red berries of partridgeberry, flowering dogwood
- Red fox hunting for mice
- Migratory birds leaving or passing through and winter resident birds arriving
- Some years, abundant white, wooly strings of the “Boogie-Woogie Aphid” on beech twigs Ecobit: The Boogie-Woogie Aphid Look for caterpillars or other predators eating the aphids
Winter Highlights
Plants & Landscape
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Animals
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- Rugged landscape and rock outcrops stand out!
- Fallen leaves make studying leaf shapes easy: three-fingered leaves of sassafras; scalloped leaves of chestnut oak
- Tan, dead leaves on tree—American beech
- Evergreen leaves—mountain laurel, American holly, pines
- White-and-green mottled leaves of striped prince's-pine (small plant)
- Green, bare twigs of hillside blueberry
- Dark contorted stems of mountain laurel
- Gray smooth bark of American beech
- Dark, deeply furrowed bark of chestnut oak
- Fat, onion-shaped flower buds on flowering dogwood tree
- Winter resident birds such as dark-eyed junco, ruby-crowned kinglet, golden-crowned kinglet, hermit thrush, yellow-rumped warbler
- Gray squirrels noisily chasing each other through the tree tops in late January and February—part of courtship and mating