by David Thompson

Signs of spring were evident well before March 20 when spring officially started. One sign that wasn’t visible was the unmistakable smell of a striped skunk whose mating season was underway. It may have sprayed an attacker with potent musk in self-defense while searching for a mate at night.

Rarely seen because of being nocturnal, skunks begin to mate in February. Then and more often in March, their odor spreads across my neighbor’s open field bordered by large oak trees and conifers. Among the trees at the top of a creek’s steep bank are numerous burrows dug by woodchucks that are used as dens by skunks. If you didn’t smell them at night or dawn, you wouldn’t know they existed.

Newborn skunks will arrive in April or May. They will nurse in the den for six to eight weeks before becoming old enough to accompany their mother at night. As she searches for food for herself, her young learn to take care of themselves.

One summer afternoon while fishing along a creek, I came upon a family of skunks walking more or less in single file through woods standing on the damp flood plain. The location had skunk cabbages that had started growing back in March. When only inches high, a skunk cabbage while developing has a purplish hood until the cabbage leaves become large and green. The cabbage smells like a skunk.

In mid-March this year as trout were being stocked in creeks and lakes for the April 4 opening of trout fishing season, two drake mallard ducks and one hen appeared swimming upstream in the creek. They were the first waterfowl to show up as their breeding season approached.

All three ducks wore plumage that looked new. The hen’s bill was orange, the males’ bills being yellow. Each drake’s green head was lustrous. They looked plump and healthy with no signs of the avian virus that killed snow geese in southeastern Pennsylvania during winter.

One of the drakes swam closely behind the hen while the other drake swam ahead by himself. Eventually, he might try to find his own hen. There was no way to know whether they had wintered in the area or recently had migrated back to Pennsylvania from someplace south.

It’s fairly common for mallards to winter here. Some hang out on creeks and ponds located near dairy or beef farms unless the water freezes which happened this year. The ice forced waterfowl to make due with any unfrozen water they could find.

The hen that was accompanied by two drakes came to a place in the creek where she left the water and climbed partway up the bank among brush and tree limbs on the ground. She was searching for a good place to nest. If she selects that spot she will regret it because of work being done close by on the land. Farther upstream or downstream are quiet places for her to lay seven to 10 eggs this month.

I doubt that I’ll ever see her ducklings. After they hatch, she’ll take them downstream to where it connects with a larger waterway having more water that is deeper. It would be safer there except for snapping turtles, big large-mouth bass, and mature northern water snakes. On land, ducklings unable to fly yet can be caught by coyotes, foxes, raccoons, minks, and hawks.

Not remembering whether I had cleaned one of the backyard birdhouses, I opened it and found a recently made nest eight inches high that filled the box from the bottom up nearly to the entrance hole. The compact nest had been built by mid-March by bluebirds using long, thin grasses and weeds.

The pair of bluebirds now must keep control of their house that also will interest house wrens that are more aggressive than bluebirds. Another threat is a brown-headed cowbird will lay eggs in the bluebird house. If that happens, the bluebirds unknowingly will hatch the cowbird’s eggs and raise the young cowbirds even though some young bluebirds might die in the process.

The first male cowbird showed up here March 21 after wintering farther south. When a female arrives and mates, she’ll soon look for an already built nest with eggs and add her own. She and other female brown-headed cowbirds are referred to as parasites that rely on other species of birds to ensure that a new generation of cowbirds is raised every spring.

In appearance, cowbirds are brownish black and somewhat resemble starlings in color and size. Cowbirds once were called “buffalo birds” because they stayed with the large herds of bison that lived on the Great Plains.

March 24, I spotted the first eastern phoebe to return after wintering probably where it had insects to eat. I’d been watching for a phoebe since late February which is the earliest that this species has arrived, being a harbinger of spring that often precedes the singing of spring peepers and the honking of Canada geese flying north.

The phoebe that I saw was a female checking out the outdoor electric light fixture above the front steps where a female has made a nest and with her mate raised usually two broods every year. This insect-eating songbird is gray on back and wings and has a sooty white breast. The bird’s head is black. Its bill is thin and pointed, enabling the bird to snatch small flying insects or grab them off tree branches and leaves.

The phoebe is named for its call that sounds like “fee-bee, fee-bee.” The female and male pretty much look alike. To make a nest, the female gathers grasses, long needles of white pine trees, dry leaves, string, and animal hair and uses mud from puddles or creek banks to hold these materials together.

A nest often is built where it is protected from above so that predators cannot reach the eggs and nestlings. Crows, blue jays, squirrels, and black rat snakes are threats.

In my old outbuilding with glass window panes missing, Carolina wrens constructed a nest on a shelf early in March. Built mostly with leaves and small sticks, the bulky nest is the size of a soccer ball. The nest has a funnel-shaped entrance.

After building this big nest, the wrens seemed to lose interest in it. When I checked the nest on March 31, however, it contained two eggs, leaving three or four more to come. Carolina wrens reportedly mate for life and their calls sound like “tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle.” Their greatest threats in the outbuilding are black rat snakes. If the wrens are lucky, they will raise a brood before the snakes become active.