What's Your Nature?
Become a Nature Up North explorer to share your encounters with wild things and wild places in New York's North Country. Post your wildlife sightings, landscape shots, photos from your outings, and even your organization's events!
Encounters
Wood frogs are loud and proud in the vernal pools, even though they're still half covered in ice. Wood frogs started calling two days ago, chorus frogs started with their creaky door trill this morning.
No peepers yet!
Saw the first garter snakes of the year this morning by our beaver pond.
Doing spring clean up in the yard at the Nicandri Nature Center and found our first salamander of the year. Not sure if it is Jefferson or Jefferson/blue spotted hybrid (which we believe we have in the park). Dark slate with barely visible blue. Was cold and we moved him to safe leaf litter from the sidewalk.
The area around the beaver pond has several spots where skunk cabbage is emerging. Lots of tracks where critters have nibbled it or passed by.
On a nature walk this afternoon outside of St. Lawrence University. Today was a warmer day than usual resulting in the snow melting and being able to see the ground again!
A great day snowshoeing on the Peavine Swamp Trail.
To read more about it- https://hikingthetrailtoyesterday.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/peavine-swam…
It was an uncharacteristically pleasant day for the middle of December in the High Peaks. Virtually no snow, but there was plenty of ice- we used microspike the entire way up and down. This is the older trail that sees much less traffic than the new trail leading from the Olympic complex on the other side of the mountain. Round trip mileage was just under 5 miles with 925' of elevation gain. The day was quite hazy, so the views of the MacIntyre Range were not as spectacular as usual. Still, it's a fairly easy hike (for being in the High Peaks) with some nice views.
