The cattails and the tussock sedges are sprouting fresh new leaves as the beaver pond begins to green up. A pair of hooded mergansers swims together, perhaps taking a break from sitting on eggs. It feels simultaneously like an early and a late Spring.

American fly honeysuckle in bloom along a trail on the Piscassic Greenway. The smell of the paired flowers is delicate and a bit spicy.

On the Otis Hill Trail that winds through an oak and a hemlock forest we kick up two deer that bound ahead of us down the trail. The hemlock boughs are laden with the white woolly masses that cover the eggs and adults of hemlock woolly adelgid. This aphid-like invasive insect has already thinned and weakened many of the hemlocks on this ridge.