A few days ago, I took a stroll around my yard to see what signs of spring are emerging. My property is only half an acre but I have much of that left “natural”, which means allowed to grow whatever it wants after the area was mostly cleared of second growth Douglas fir in the 1960s for platting the lots in my neighborhood. That means there’s a great deal of early successional vegetation — various shrubs, vines, forbs, trees — which do well in sunny and partly shady spots. All the species described in this diary are species native to Western Washington.
Join me on my phenology stroll! This is what’s going on in the first week of March, 2022.
Most of the Ribes flowers look like the ones in the title image above but some have emerged.
There’s lots more fresh foliage than flowers newly out though. And many plants are still buttoned up tight — my focus is on what’s visibly active.
Blackberry has small thorns (technically prickles). The big thorns on branches the vine is climbing on belong to our most abundant native rose, which is just now thinking about leafing out.
Flowers are mostly still in bud, like these Oregon grape and Salmonberry.
Salmonberry flowers will be as welcome to the hummingbirds as the Red-flowering currant. Salmonberry fruits are luscious and beautiful, and will be welcomed by birds in May.
We have two kinds of hummers in my part of Washington. The resident Anna’s are already nesting. The Rufouses are have only just arrived for the breeding season.
The flowers of our earliest flowering trees — Beaked Hazelnut and the far more abundant Red Alder — aren’t directly useful to the birds though the tree provides many other benefits to them, from nesting habitat to seeds that are food for birds like Pine siskins.
However insects do use the abundant wind-blown pollen as food:
honey bees—as well as some other pollinators—collect the pollen to feed their young. The pollen is high in starch, so it is a good source of food energy for the developing bees. www.honeybeesuite.com/...
The two earliest flowering native trees in my area are both wind-pollinated. Their catkins start puffing up in February and by now their pollen is triggering seasonal allergies in many of us.
The chart shows the wind-pollinated trees being first in the allergy season. Soon enough maple and cottonwood. Then pine. After that comes the grasses, in summer. I find allergy season worse and worse each year. You?
When the deciduous woods turn pink hereabouts it means the alders are ripening with pollen. That’s the look we’re seeing now. All that pink is very pretty, the flush of spring.
In bwren’s Bucket Tuesday she suggested I republish a Bucket I presented some years ago that showed microscopic views of the pollen from these early flowering plants. Turns out that diary was stripped of its photos in the big DK image purge a few years ago, so if I can track down the original images I uploaded for it, I’ll do that.
In general, all these plants are coming out at the same time as they have for the past decade, according to my records (including buckets lol). Spring phenology is fairly consistent. I have not yet seen the chipmunks emerge from their burrows — last year by this time they were. Perhaps our unseasonably cold weather? It was 36° this morning.
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Temps ranging from mid 30s to mid 40s in the PNW islands the past few days. Currently partly cloudy, dry. Change in weather is forecast from cold clear sunny days to overcast with possible rain this weekend.