The inky cap can be another spring
visitor to Curry County.
The weather has been its typical, changeable self since our last installment, and if you don’t like what it is doing at the moment, just wait five minutes or so and it will be different – sometimes completely different. This time of year – March into May - we have many days in which we have frost in the morning, downpours, bright sunlight, hailstorms, thunder and lightning, and back to bright sun again. It’s not a good time of year to do things like painting or weed spraying. And just to make it more interesting, it baffles the NOAA weather prognosticators more than any other time of year. As an example, Monday and Tuesday, the 24th and 25th of March, were forecast for showers and periods of rain. Nary a drop, at least here. That’s certainly better than the other possibility, but it does make it harder to plan.
This morning, we awoke to a thorough dusting of snow! It didn’t last long, but we had several showers during the day that consisted of mixed rain and snow. To the weather prognosticators’ credit, the snow was forecast for higher elevations, which includes where we are. Still, it came as something of a surprise.
Meanwhile, the turkey vultures (buzzards, if you happen to live in Hinckley, Ohio) that returned earlier than normal this year have had to fit their forays in when they can, and there have been several days when the weather has been nasty enough to ground them entirely. They’re pretty hardy birds, though, and as soon as the weather breaks for even a little while, they take to the air.
Last weekend, Saturday, March 22 was forecast with little chance of rain and we had outdoor work to do, cleaning up (still!) after December’s storms, the windiest we’ve seen in our ten years here, and that’s saying something. We found a couple of small patches of crested coral (Clavulina cristata), but those were the only fungi we saw other than polypores and the like. What we didn’t see, but what did see at least me, was poison oak, and I got a nasty rash on my face and leg. It’s time to be thinking about it again, and brush up on it in your plant books if needed. Remember: “Leaves of three, let it be.”
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