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| Maple Flowers |
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| Willow |
April 17, 2026
Nantucket is now lit up with daffodils. They are the human measure of hope for the spring. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Nantucket Daffodil Festival next week...so the brilliance was planted during my time here. Sometimes I prefer the less bold signs of spring: the red maple blossoms and earliest wood anemone spring ephemerals in Squam Swamp; the bright pussy willow blooms near Sesachacha Pond.
The return of water is another sign of spring...and there is lots of water and killdeer at Windswept Bog. The spring peepers are in chorus. I was delighted by the sight of a Wilson's Snipe flying toward Stump Pond. No green-winged teal or sandpipers. Alder Run, which was completely dry these past two summers, is now a small watercourse. On April 10, Nantucket was moved down to a Level 1 Drought from Level 2.
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| Killdeer |
There are still some gannets and long tailed ducks on the ocean out front. The scoters are thinning out. It's the season shuffling time of year when I start wondering...is this the last of season bufflehead I will see, or dark-eyed junco or white throated sparrow? Meanwhile, we have welcomed the ospreys and egrets are back and the Eastern Towhees are preeting. I saw my FOY catbird.
April 18 was a mizzle day in the 40s with fog and wind. I biked the Polpis Loop anyway, while a northern harrier hunted overhead and my FOY pine warbler sang along the way.
Sesachacha was connected to the Atlantic Ocean and drained on April 4 . That restores Cain's Pond as a separate entity and opens up the shores to shorebirds. Greater Yellowlegs and Killdeer were making use of it. On April 19 I found the trail from Sesachacha to Quidnet that I used to run on when the kids were young and we took them to Quidnet to the beach. Can't wait to visit it again on my bike when more birds are around.
