Spring is officially here now – I’ve found the first wildflower.

A very obscure little flower, but it’s always the first to bloom.  It’s called Common Whitlow Grass – not really a grass, but a plant in the mustard family.  It’s extremely small – about an inch high, and the flowers are only a few millimeters across.  It’s an annual that grows on the steepest and sandiest parts of our remnants.  I found 6 or 8 plants in bloom yesterday on Sumac Prairie.

I also found a beautiful little beetle – it came in for a landing on a dead grass leaf while I was sitting on the slope of Sumac Prairie, admiring the view.  It’s only about 6mm long, but brightly patterned in red and white.  It’s called a Sumac Flea Beetle, and both larvae and adults eat sumac leaves.

This next series of photos shows how close we still are to winter – the mornings are very cold – often below zero, but sunny afternoons can get into the 60s.  On one of our morning walks we found this Woolly Bear caterpillar, covered with ice crystals.

I took it back to the house, and left it on the porch in the sun.  The ice melted.

And the caterpillar started to crawl away.  (I released it outside.)

The woodchucks have reappeared behind the house.  They’ve built a labyrinth of tunnels through the rocks, and whenever we go out, they disappear into one of their many entrance holes.  They started digging under the porch, but after we stamped loudly above their heads a few times, they seem to have given that up.

At this time of year, anything that’s really green catches my eye.  The woodland plants aren’t growing yet, except for the few that are evergreen.  My least favorite of these is Garlic Mustard – an invader that I’m trying to keep out by pulling it up whenever I find it.

A much nicer plant is Shining Club-moss.  It’s a native, and is one of a group of plants that are sometimes called Ground Pine.  They don’t have flowers – they reproduce by spores – more like ferns.  Right now, when most things are brown, they make big patches of green in the woods.

A detail showing the spore cases, in between the leaves.

Another evergreen forest plant is Rattlesnake Plantain – a small orchid that grows in our woods.  It blooms in July with a stalk of tiny white flowers.

I’m still seeing lots of Compton Tortoiseshell butterflies.  They flutter around the garage, and whenever have the doors open, they wait until the last possible minute, just before the doors close, and fly inside.  So I’ve found a few of them trapped inside the closed garage, fluttering frantically against the windows trying to get out.