Wild Side: New signs of spring

My last column — of course you remember! — looked at how our late February blizzard likely affected wildlife. One thing I neglected to mention was that, extreme as that storm may have been, the snow it left behind was not long for this world.

As March begins in Southern New England, the sun angle and day length are the same as we experience in early fall, when hot weather is still very possible. Faced with sunlight of that intensity and duration, snow quickly succumbs to rising temperatures, and the rest of that natural world likewise responds. Sure, winter weather is still possible. But spring is inevitable.

This is one of my favorite times of year. (Well, OK, you caught me: They’re all favorites.) Conditions change from day to day, and every outing produces new signs of the progressing season. As the weather warmed and the snow dwindled in the second week of March, I launched my 2026 bug-hunting campaign.

On Monday, March 9, on my first real outing of the season, I visited a stretch of powerline in Vineyard Haven that has proven productive in the past. Two days later, I returned to the same area, and the differences I observed were dramatic.

On that first visit, insects were scarce. I tallied a total of just five individuals. Four of them were flies of the same species (in the genus Pollenia), which had overwintered as adults, and the fifth was a moth larva that I found where it had overwintered in the stem of a pitch pine sapling. The habitat was likewise uninspiring, showing obvious signs of the recent blanket of frozen water: soggy, compressed vegetation, and leaf litter, with significant areas still under residual patches of snow. The soil surface, where the sun struck, was warm enough, but just an inch down, the ground was still chilled.

The habitat wasn’t the only thing in need of refurbishment. My field skills proved rusty after the long winter. One area in need of improvement was my ability to discriminate between actual insects and false cues such as leaf fragments tumbling in the wind or even the “floaters” in my eyes! Reacting to a non-insect isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it does occupy time and attention that would be better spent searching for or approaching the real thing.

My reflexes, likewise, needed polishing. Seconds count, and mistakes are usually final with insect photography. With the camera, I occasionally found myself making errors like turning a knob in the wrong direction for an adjustment I wanted to make — opening the lens up, for example, when I meant to stop it down. Approaching flies to attempt photographs, I made clumsy, amateurish approaches that flushed the insect long before I was within camera range. These skills, I know based on past seasons, will come back quickly, and indeed by the end of my Wednesday outing, I was already feeling pretty darn slick. 

The habitat and the insects had likewise progressed by that second visit, to a striking extent. Formerly sodden soil was warm and dry; the layer of soggy fallen leaves, formerly squashed flat to the ground by the pressure of the snow pack, had dried and lifted into an aerated, fluffy structure; many plants were showing subtle signs of breaking dormancy; and the insect life had burgeoned in both diversity and numbers.

Those Pollenia flies had multiplied from a handful of individuals to scores, and they were joined by smaller numbers of at least two other fly species. Two kinds of parasitic wasps were on the wing, fun to chase but impossible to photograph as they patrolled incessantly in search of suitable targets. Many grasshopper nymphs, undoubtedly present two days before but too inert for me to detect, leapt from underfoot. And tiger beetles, conspicuously absent two days before, were plentiful on the warming soil, emerging from their overwintering burrows to pursue ants and spiders. 

I expect it sounds odd to describe outings like these as successes: Investing an hour and a mile or more of walking to photograph three insects probably sounds like a waste of time. Even the more productive second visit might sound boring, with numbers and diversity that, while improved, were still paltry.

It’s certainly true that the abundance of summer is fun to observe, and I’ll never turn down the thrill of spotting a rarity, or even just a species new to my own experience. But the late winter mindset is different. I never tire of witnessing such rapid change in the natural world. And I take enormous pleasure in greeting, every spring, the first representatives of species I’ve befriended in past seasons.

On these days on which winter melts into spring, you may not see much. But compared with nothing, a little is a lot.