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The Daily Bucket. Early visit to Butterfly Valley, snow and mud. But then... [1]

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Date: 2025-04-03

Of course, I knew it was going to be snowy and muddy on the road and up at Butterfly Valley. That’s part of the reason I went, on the e-bike. Go play in the mud, ya know?

I also was hopeful that some early spring orchids might have been out but really, I knew that was highly unlikely. But if you don’t go then you’ll never know, will you?

There weren’t any orchids.

The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns. We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow.

Photos in the order I took them:

Wild Turkey hens about eight miles into the trip.

At the Pitcher Plant Bog walk way in Butterfly Valley Botanical Area; a couple of inches of snow on the ground.

Compare with my trip back in October:

And that was it for Butterfly Valley: I came, I looked around a bit, I got muddy, wet and a little cold and almost dumped the bike coming back down a steep muddy stretch of road but just saved actually going down (at about walking speed, even slower, so no danger) and retraced my route along the north side of American Valley, where I heard a Bald Eagle call and then saw it up in the sky. A juvenile. Bald Eagle are nesting here, that’s a near-certainty I think. I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted one nest but it’s out in the middle of cow pasture, a full half-mile distant from the closest I can get. Haven’t even bothered with attempting a photo of the nest; it’s just too far off.

Baldy Jr. soars against the cloud sky backdrop.

Same image, cropped in for better look at the bird.

Winging away. I’m catching what I can with the camera.

The exposure was not very good for the color image so I did some fiddling around with Grayscale in my editing program.

And faffing about with a color image:

Back to normal color scaling, and an American Crow begins harassing the juvenile Baldy, dive bombing on it to drive it away. Crows don’t like any raptors, that’s for sure. I’ve seen the crows going after Red-tailed Hawks and Northern Harrier on several occasions.

I watched for a couple minutes more as the eagle moved off, soon out of camera range. Time to get on back home and warmed back up.

Now I’ve got some laundry to do; very dirty bib overalls, down around the ankles.

It’s your turn. What’s up in your seasonally-changing natural world?

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