Apr 30, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Margaret Carney
It's inevitable. After all the cold snaps, all the rain, spring must arrive, with its sweet songs and fragrances. And colours! Forty shades of green softening the landscape is such a pleasure after the greys of winter. Against green, the vivid hues of spring positively pop.
Yellow, for example. Starting with daffodils, little golden trumpets that bob in the wind, awakening bumblebees from their winter sleep. Fertilized by male bees last fall, each fuzzy yellow queen searches out an old mouse nest or other cozy hollow in the ground to house her colony, then starts collecting and storing pollen to feed her young, which hatch from the eggs she lays. Yellow trout lilies, or dog-tooth violets, are a favourite source in a deciduous woods. In clearings, you'll see bumblebees crawling over dandelions, amassing yellow pollen in their leg baskets.
For a welcome splash of spring gold you can't beat forsythia. The showy bushes aren't native to the New World, but our bees are attracted to them -- more yellow on yellow -- for a source of pollen early in spring. In exchange, of course, for pollination services. Pussy willow catkins turn yellow with pollen, too.
Male goldfinches have been slowly changing from grey-green to their vivid summer plumage of yellow and black. And meadlowlarks are back in Durham pastures, singing from fence posts and telephone lines. From behind, they're perfectly camouflaged among last year's dried grasses, but when they turn and face you, their bold black V sets off their golden throat and chest dramatically.
There's nothing as sunny as a yellow warbler just back from wintering in mangrove thickets of Central America, now perched atop a lime-green alder near a Durham wetland, singing away. The thin red streaks running down a male's chest only intensify the canary hue.
A whole raft of other migrating wood-warblers are decorated with yellow, making for many a glorious sight in the next few weeks before trees leaf out. Black-throated green warblers have a bright golden face, northern parulas a lemony bib. Canada warblers have a delicate black necklace draped across their sunny underparts, while Wilson's warblers, predominantly golden, wear a black cap. Chestnut-sided warblers sport a flaxen one. Yellow-rumped and magnolia warblers are dabbed and streaked with gold.
You have to look close to see the "golden crown" of a tiny golden-crowned kinglet, migrating flocks of which have been filling local woodlots for weeks. It's worth checking every one; males sometimes raise their orangey-yellow crest when they're excited.
The female robin sitting on eggs in the grass-mud nest she built on our porch during last week's rain has a bright yellow lower bill. I see it every time I peep out the front door to check that she's OK, perched up there warming her eggs.
Nature queries: 905-725-2116 or
mcarney@interlinks.net.
Durham resident Margaret Carney, in addition to writing nature appreciation columns, has also published several children's books.
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