Mark Blazis: Last spring's weather posed challenges
April 2018 proved one of the cruelest ever outdoors. On the first day, the first arriving robins, fooled by a spring-like late-March, scoured lawns for early-emerging earthworms. But winter re-emerged instead — and persisted for most of the month. April and Easter had historically been equated with rebirth, but retreat was what we witnessed in nature outdoors.
With high winds, freezing rains and heavy seas, few charter fishing boats or lobstermen left the dock. Lobster prices soared to $14 per pound. Vermont skiers, though, celebrated a wealth of late-season trails to run.
One mid-April evening, Rutland’s Brian Hutchins was attacked by a coyote raiding his chicken coop. One of only 10 people attacked by coyotes in Massachusetts since 1998, Hutchins fended off the coyote with a knife, wounding it severely.
Fortunately, the coyote only scratched Hutchins’ head. The thick Carharrt jacket that the carpenter habitually wears saved him from being bitten. Coyotes’ bites are always a concern, though, considering they can possibility cause rabies. The boldness of the coyote likely was due to her urgency to feed her newborn pups.
At their annual dinner meeting, the Worcester County League of Sportsmen’s Clubs celebrated Uxbridge’s Ralph True with their Words of Wisdom Award for long promoting sportsmen’s issues in his writings.
April 14 spit brought another half-inch of snow. Regardless, just two days later, huge waves of our first neotropical migrant warblers began arriving in our forests expecting better weather and emerging caterpillars on which to feed. The research team at the Auburn Sportsman’s Club banded an amazing 27 palm warblers in just the first wave, which was accompanied by several other species. Elsewhere, large numbers of rails and shorebirds were recorded. A week later, ruby-throated hummingbirds began arriving from Mexico. Without vocalization, they emphatically proclaimed that spring was finally here. The big change had come.
On April 23, perfect spring peeper weather and high-water conditions delighted the 58 rapid-challenging Quinebaug River kayak and canoe paddlers competing in the 6-mile All American River Race. A few overturned in the rapids and safely swam much chilled to shore. Kayaker Gus Madore came in first in 47 minutes, 43 seconds. The annual Sturbridge Lions Club fundraising event again was an exciting success. And light rain on both opening days of the Connecticut and Massachusetts wild turkey spring seasons didn’t stop many hunters from bagging a tom.
While it had been misleadingly cool in our region, much of the rest of the world was sweltering. April ended with the Pakistani city of Nawabshah setting a world-record temperature at 122.4 degrees Fahrenheit. The weather that followed here would reflect the pattern of global/ocean warming that undeniably is a growing threat to us all.
May’s first week began like summer, with two days in the mid-80s. Buds exploded along with mayfly hatches and more waves of migratory songbirds from the tropics.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that diseases from ticks, fleas and mosquitoes had tripled in the last two warming decades, and nine new diseases had entered the country — all making the outdoors more of a risk for the unprotected.
With temperatures approaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit, summer arrived prematurely on May 2. Buds opened to briefly reveal baby green, just as pollen from maples, elms, junipers, and box elders erupted high on the allergy Richter scale. Woodchucks came boldly out of their burrows hungry and ready to raid gardens.
Also during early May, more than 100 migrating right whales — nearly a quarter of their endangered world population — rested and fed in Cape Cod Bay, necessitating the closure of the lobstering business there until May 15. Lobster pot lines had been proving lethal entanglements. From Scituate to the Cape Cod Canal, more than 300 lobstermen kept their boats docked. Boding future tragedy for them, not one baby right whale would be born this year.
Simultaneously, sei whales — a species normally encountered far out at sea — were observed from just outside Gloucester Harbor to Stellwagen Bank. Their Norwegian name means pollock, which appear off the Norwegian coast the same time as the whales arrive. At least 80 of these fastest-of-all big whales surface-fed on a rare explosion of grain-sized, high-protein copepods, about 2000 pounds of which each sei eats every day.
To the delight of inland anglers, the glorious Hendrickson mayfly hatch emerged pretty much on time, obeying the imperative of light and water temperature.
With the disgraced “Codfather,” Carlos Rafael, behind bars for overfishing cod, flounder, haddock and other groundfish, 22 of his armada of fishing boats were confined to dock. New Bedford, the most valuable fishing port in America thanks to its scallop harvest, was a scene of penitent unemployment. Scalloping, however, was largely unaffected by Rafael’s incarceration.
Field & Stream magazine accorded national publicity to Wachusett Reservoir in its list of 50 top fishing spots, describing the water as pristine, bait-rich, and advantageously limited to shore fishing, which reduces pressure, keeping it perennially full of trophy smallmouth bass and lake trout.
Particularly notable was the abundance of bay-breasted, Tennessee and Cape May warblers, along with gray-cheeked thrushes. Twenty-one species of warblers were observed in just a day at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The unprecedented number of bay-breasted warblers there and elsewhere likely reflected an increase in their essential food supply — spruce budworms — up north in the coniferous forests that had historically been heavily sprayed with insecticides.
May birders were visually stunned by the gorgeous fiery-yellow male prothonotary warbler found singing to stake out a territory in Oxford. This brightly colored species that winters from Mexico to Venezuela was named after the yellow-robed Catholic Church’s Prothonotary, whose duties involved care of papal documents. A southerly species, the Prothonotary is the only eastern-breeding warbler that nests in tree cavities. Disappointingly, the lonely, out-of-range male never found a female to mate with.
Strangely, while so many songbirds were moving north, two snowy owls that should have been back on the tundra remained at Duxbury Beach as late as May 18. In Boylston, Todd Olanyk, the volunteer coordinator for MassWildlife’s Hunter Education Program, was selected to replace Bill Davis as the new Central District manager.
Sadly, Bill Byrne, MassWildife’s nationally acclaimed wildlife photographer, died on May 13. Many of his photos were the highlight of MassWildlife magazine and numerous other wildlife journals. Several were freely provided for this column. Byrne was a gentleman/perfectionist, with an exceptional eye for detail and composition. His standards of dramatic composition and clarity were remarkable.
On May 27, Alberto ushered in the hurricane season four days early. Parts of the country were inundated with catastrophic flooding. Meanwhile, record heat hit the Great Plains. Minneapolis hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit — the highest temperature there since the Dust Bowl days. And Massachusetts continued its drought-like conditions that necessitated watering bans in numerous towns.
May turned out to be one of our driest on record. It was actually too dry for larval ticks, which died in great numbers. Normal fungus reproduction was negligible. As a result, at the end of the month, the gypsy moth numbers exploded again, making lacework of many of our apple and oak trees.
With the Arctic heating and melting at a rate never witnessed before, the summer of our discontent began — the hottest summer we had ever experienced. Heavy rains and heat waves proved abnormally long and relentless as natural atmospheric circulation patterns continued to be distorted by global/ocean warming.
On June 9, a snowy owl that should have long departed to breed in the Arctic was seen on a flat roof top in Newburyport. A bear wandering through the Warren Avenue neighborhood of Leicester caused a stir, too, but, as usual, caused no harm.
Happily, and right on time, big striped bass made their annual entry through the Cape Cod Canal, taking the man-made shortcut on their way north. Bluefish were disconcertingly hard to find, though. I took great joy in seeing a honeybee swarm in my son’s Sutton orchard — the first time I had seen such a once-common event in two decades.
Around the globe, with the glaciers of the Himalayas disappearing just as monsoons should have been alleviating drought, India faced its worst water crisis in history.
Massachusetts continued its near-rainless stretch, and on June 25, 27 percent of the U.S. baked under drought conditions. On June 28, Denver hit an all-time-record 105 degrees Fahrenheit, while 52 percent of the country had temperatures that reached 90 or higher. Then July — normally our hottest month — started heating up.
Calendar
Tuesday — "The Swamp," 9 p.m., Channel 2 (WGBH). The beauty and value of a real swamp, and the costly consequences of draining it.
Thursday-Sunday — 50th Hartford Boat Show at Mohegan Sun, Uncasville, Connecticut. Info: www.hartfordboatshow.com
Friday-Sunday — The Fly Fishing Show, Royal Plaza Trade Center, 181 Boston Post Road West, Marlboro. Info: www.flyfishingshow.com/marlborough-ma/
Sunday — Striper Day, striped bass fishing seminars sponsored by Surfcasters Journal, 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m., Ward Melville High School, East Setauket, New York. Info: www.striperday.com.
—Contact Mark Blazis at markblazis@charter.net.