The Old Farmer's Almanac 2015 (14 page)

March Hath 31 Days

Frozen ruts and slippery walks;

Gray old crops of last year’s stalks.

–
Christopher Pearse Cranch

Farmer’s Calendar

Gas generators start with a slow, thumping putt-putt-puttputtputtputtputt that speeds up until it becomes a whir—unless the generator fails to catch. Then it fades with a discouraged wheeze, and the owner has to try again. Once started during winter power outages, though, it makes a staccato sound that we hardly notice.

Then one warm spring day, while walking the dogs, we were surprised to hear what sounded like a generator starting up in the woods. The ice and snow had long since departed. Who needed a generator now?

When we got home, I went out on the screened porch to read, and the generator started up again, right behind our house: putt-putt-puttputtputtputtputtwheeze. It was coming from less than 10 yards away.

Abandoning the generator theory, I took a few steps in that direction, and a brown rocket exploded out of a brush pile, making me jump. The mysterious noise was a male ruffed grouse, drumming to attract a lady friend.

The bird “drums” not by striking a log, as was once supposed, but by opening and closing his wings so rapidly that they become a blur. One authority compares the sound to “an engine starting up in the distance.”

Just so.

The Fourth Month

SKY WATCH
A total lunar eclipse on the 4th is visible before dawn from the western states and provinces; elsewhere in North America, only its beginning phase can be glimpsed before the Moon sets. Mars is now too close to the Sun to be seen. Venus passes just left of the Seven Sisters star cluster between the 10th and the 13th. Jupiter stands high in the south at nightfall. Mercury begins a fine apparition in the west at dusk on the 23rd. The crescent Moon passes just left of Venus on the 21st and meets Jupiter on the 25th and 26th. Saturn rises before 11:00 P.M. in Scorpius. Mercury passes just left of the Seven Sisters on the 30th; use binoculars.

April Hath 30 Days

April the Beautiful, with streaming eyes,

Weeps o’er the havoc that rude March has made.

–
John Askham

Farmer’s Calendar

The ice on our pond melted early this year, and it wasn’t long before the snapping turtles started climbing up on a half-submerged log to bask in the strengthening sun. Some days, you can see half a dozen snappers of various sizes there. The log is on the far side of the pond, maybe 60 yards from our path, and from that distance their shells have a dull-black sheen. They look like cast-iron frying pans turned upside down.

There must be a lot of snappers in the pond. We’ve seen their burrows with fragments of eggs in them, either where the young have hatched or where predators have dug them up and eaten them. There’s evidence of the snappers’ predation as well. We saw two Canada geese convoying a flock of goslings around the pond one day this month, but we haven’t seen the little ones since. Perhaps they became snacks for the snappers.

Several years ago, while walking the dogs, I stumbled upon an enormous snapper lying in the middle of the path. It was probably 3 feet long from beak to tail and looked like a bonsai dinosaur. The experience reminded me of the final line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” about encountering a snake and feeling “zero at the bone.”

The Fifth Month

SKY WATCH
Mercury has its best evening star appearance of 2015 in the first half of the month, in Taurus. It stands to the left of the Pleiades on the 1st and is brightest for the first few days of the month. Jupiter stands high in the southwest at dusk and sets after midnight. It stands above the waxing Moon on the 23rd. Venus is at its highest and sets before midnight. The month belongs to Saturn, brighter than it has appeared in over a decade. It stands at opposition on the night of the 22nd, rising at dusk and remaining out all night long. Its rings are nearly as wide “open” as possible, a glorious sight through any telescope magnification above 30×.

May Hath 31 Days

Thou art winsome, light, and gay,

Smiling May.

–
George Burden

Farmer’s Calendar

We never got around to felling any trees for firewood last fall, so here we are in spring with a skimpy woodpile, most of it white birch, which looks pretty in a fireplace but doesn’t supply much heat. When you live in the woods, it’s embarrassing to buy cordwood. So we’re scavenging for dead wood, which won’t need to dry.

There’s quite a bit of it, mostly from oaks decapitated by ice storms. We can snap off kindling-length branches with our fingers. The real prizes are snags, dead trees still standing on their stumps. When their bark sloughs off, it deprives insects of shelter and prevents rotting. The wood is as smooth and hard as ivory and burns with a clear white flame.

Summer is the best time to look for snags: They stand out from the other trees because they have no leaves. Even so, we sometimes get fooled by a stubborn survivor, dead at the ground, dead at the top, but still flying its green pennants from a branch or two.

For a while, we couldn’t see the dead trees for the forest. In time, we learned how to look at them with new eyes, and now it’s amazing how many we have. I counted 50 on a ¼-mile walk. In places, they outnumber the living trees. As it says in The Book of Common Prayer, “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

The Sixth Month

SKY WATCH
Venus reaches its greatest elongation from the Sun on the 6th and is near maximum brightness, though lower than during the past 2 months. Getting closer to brilliant Jupiter, it meets the Beehive star cluster on the 13th and 14th. The 14th also marks Mars’s passage behind the Sun in a conjunction. The crescent Moon joins Venus and Jupiter on the 19th and 20th, respectively, creating truly eye-catching conjunctions at dusk. Summer begins with the solstice on the 21st, at 12:38 P.M. The nearly full Moon stands just above Saturn on the 28th, the same day that a 5-day conjunction between Venus and Jupiter begins.