A Northern Spring II: on land

Walking along the brook (in shadow on the right in the photo below), I saw something tiny and bright red by some twigs:

Upon inspection, I realized that I was looking at the remains of an otter repast. The ground was littered with fish scales, and the tiny red thing was a small bone or cartilage, probably from the gills, with remnants of bright red flesh still attached:

Most interesting of all, there were small clusters of bright yellow eggs left behind:

I asked fishing friends if they could ID the fish, and eventually with the help of a State of Maine biologist they converged on a fallfish as the most likely victim . They do spawn at this time of year, and one friend had recently caught one a mile or so downstream from my brook. This last photo was taken a couple of winters ago, and the fish in question (half a mile upstream from the dining debris) is definitely a fallfish (a type of chub native to New England).

My other favorite aquatic mammal has created a new perfectly symmetrical sculpture:

In the woods, the red maples have been flowering. Some trees bear only male flowers,

and others only female ones.

The pollen is spread by the winds to the female flowers, which eventually produce the seeds as winged samaras. The male flowers fall gently off into the streams, where the waters had gathered them into a heart:

I found a strange plant called Snakeskin Liverwort, or Snakewort, Conocephalum salebrosum:

It is a non-vascular plant, a primitive small creeping thing whose name is very descriptive. Each leaf (or thallus) is covered in polygonal bubbles which are air pores:

It has a distinctive smell, and is also called Great Scented Liverwort or Cat’s Tongue liverwort. It needs moist places (this was right next to the stream), partly because of the lack of veins to transport water, but also because for reproduction the sperm must swim through water from one plant to find another plant with eggs.

And the very earliest blooms, as always are the trailing arbutus: