The worm moon is about to rise, and it’s supposed to be really big and orange this year.
This is the name some Native Americans give to the full moon in March because that’s when the ground warms and earthworms appear. Others call it a bark moon, when the snow melts and refreezes, or a sap moon, when the maple trees are tapped.
But we had some snow to melt because this winter was the warmest on record for the lower 48 states, and my friends tapped their trees in February. This makes me wonder: What signs of spring still align with such ancient wisdom?
I’m taking a walk around our farm in Pennsylvania.
There are few more beautiful places to observe the onset of spring than a lake. The spotted salamander has already attached its white, globular egg masses to forsythia branches that bend beneath the surface, and the wood frogs, in their little black Zorro masks, leap from the bank in front of me into the water.
Henry David Thoreau called wood frogs “the very voice of the weather,” and what a voice it is: a deep, repetitive croak like the growl of a banjo. They basically freeze over the winter and are among the first frogs to emerge from the leaf litter to breed in the spring, when the females lay masses of gelatinous, black-spotted eggs at the edge of the pond.
But my favorite frog is the spring hide, whose mating call surrounds our sleeping porch at night with a sound so loud and high-pitched I could swear spaceships are landing. Who can’t love a one-inch, nocturnal, camouflaged tree frog with an X on its back? All amphibians are threatened by the destruction of wetlands, but spring species are widespread here.
Beside the creek, the cabbage pops reliably out of the mud, its spotted, tawny-yellow spatula resembling a jester’s hat. I drop to my hands and knees and smell its rotting meat-like aroma, which pollinators apparently love, and inadvertently startle a fly hovering around the spiky, prehistoric-looking flower called a spadix.
Skunk cabbage fascinates me because it is one of a small group of plants that can generate their own heat. It could even melt the snow around it if we had. It’s an ancient plant, here since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it’s now suffering in Tennessee. Can Pennsylvania Cabbage Be Far Behind?
Near a path in the forest, I see my first spring beauty. As the weather warms, I’ll be on the lookout for our other native wildflowers like Virginia bluebells, trillium and trout lily.
Spring ephemera, they say. Their name alone is magical! These flowers bloom when the sunlight hits the forest, before the trees escape. But they don’t stay with us for long, having only a short window to bloom and fertilize. Then they die completely, as if they were never here. I’m worried though. We have so many deer eating them, and invasive plants are taking over their territory.
In the old cow pasture, I hear what is reliably our first returning songbird: the red-winged blackbird, abundant in North America. And at dawn, from the apple tree outside my bedroom window, I hear the first “fee-bee”. This means the eastern phoebe is back and will soon be nesting in the cupboard door light fixture that has been used every year for 36 years.
I’m waiting for the chimneys. Not for their song, but for the funnel cloud they create at dusk as they fly around like fighter pilots trying to dive down our 19th century stone chimney. Sometimes I rescue a baby that has fallen down on the hearth—as close as a man can get to a bird that spends all day on the wing. But where we once had many of these insectivores raising their young, last year we saw few. They have declined about 70 percent in the past 50 years, researchers say, largely due to habitat loss and pesticides that kill the insects they rely on for food.
When I forage for ramps, also known as wild leeks, I do so sustainably. Someone took a dining-table-sized batch of them out of the woods a while back, and irresponsible foragers are selling a lot of them to restaurants. This has caused the plant to be listed as vulnerable in many states.
I luck out and find a patch of red elf mushrooms, which grow on dead wood and whose name conjures up elves roaming the woods. Their color also fascinates me: an orange exterior when new and a bright red interior that catches rainwater. Some say they are edible, although I have not tried them.
I’ve been looking for morels for a while now, which I saute in butter and pile deliciously on toast. Locals tell me, however, that there aren’t as many as they once were. The black sorrel fruits first, any day now, when the soil temperature reaches 50 degrees, according to lore. But May is when I find my precious specimens, golden and eight inches tall if the stars align.
I like to imagine fairies having meetings above the umbrella-like leaves of May apples. This native plant is poisonous except for the ripe, yellow fruit (throw away the seeds, says a keeper), but people here make apple jelly and wine. Small mammals eat the fruits, as do box turtles, important for seed dispersal.
May apples are used in wart medicine and are being studied as an anti-cancer agent. We have large colonies around the farm, but the plant is having problems in Vermont and Florida.
At the bottom of a gray March wood, I see flashes of yellow: the tiny, delicate clusters of allspice flowers. I cut some sprigs to make a spring tonic. This aromatic plant can substitute for allspice and is a host plant for the allspice butterfly. In the fall, the thrush eats the red berries before migrating to the Gulf of Mexico.
We don’t miss nettles, which I eat raw for their anti-inflammatory effects, despite burning my fingers and tongue. Most people think of this plant as a weed and try to eradicate it, but it has amazing medicinal and culinary properties. I already have a rash on both wrists from poison ivy, a plant that thrives in our warm climate, growing much faster with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In my wanderings through the fields and woods of this old farm, it’s easy to forget what’s happening to the plants and animals around me. Everything looks so beautiful, so peaceful. But all I have to do is peel back a thin pastoral veneer to see how many signs of spring are no longer in sync with the old rhythms of the season.
Still, I can’t help but enjoy these, the harbingers of spring and the rebirth they symbolize. Plants die, but they come back. Birds leave, but reappear. The frogs freeze and then sing their hearts out. Fruit mushrooms once again. Aren’t we all just spring ephemera? Do we shine as gloriously as we can and then we’re gone?
And I’m hopeful for a sign of spring we thought we’d missed: the budding, almost fluorescent green leaves of the ash.
Hundreds of ash trees have been toppled in these forests due to emerald ash borer. But some trees, it turns out, did not succumb to the brilliant green beetle. These survivors have become known as lingering ash, and from them scientists breed new trees. In some areas, there are also reports of an increase in ash saplings and saplings.
Perhaps none of them will reach maturity. Nobody knows yet. Not in my lifetime, for sure. But maybe, just maybe, our grandchildren’s generation will be able to see a bright spring moon rise above those towering trees again.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s book ‘A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests’ was recently published by Stackpole Books.