6:29 a.m. (sunrise two minutes earlier than yesterday). 37 degrees, wind NW 11 mph (The treachery of the wind, unhampered and free-ranging: several more standing-dead paper birches fell last night, released by saturated soil and shallow, rotten roots.) Sky: flat light, gray, and threatening, sun and crows among the missing. Permanent streams: rain-enhanced, unbridled babble drowns out nearby birds. Turkey running along the lower stream bank; head up, chest out, stiff-legged gait almost mechanical. Small head, big bird, heads to the dance party in the lower pasture. Wetlands: sodden and duckless. Alder catkins, the sausage-shaped flowers, swaying in the breeze, purple and lemon-yellow pendants growing longer and softer, some spill pollen. Pileated silent. Song sparrow in the alders, singing amid frolicking catkins. Pond: ice in full retreat, mostly slushy surface, translucent and puddling; feeder stream open to the far shore, a black swath wedged into thin, gray ice. Winter wren sings in a bramble tangle, sweet music out of the blah. Dogs sit. I listen, almost forgetting the dismal weather, now spitting raining.
Four big-toothed aspen catkins, not fully developed, idle on the road, victims of the wind. Downy soft, oval, red-speckled pollen chambers. Separate sexes: male trees, females trees. Fast-growing, shallow-rooted, wood soft fortifies the earth for the coming of maples and beech. Grouse eat the buds, beaver the bark. By late April, aspen seeds airborne, float through The Hollow, stick to everything, dogs, screens, sweaters, gathering in the barn and garage . . . dust-bunnies of the forest. Useless for firewood, aspen wood does have a sheen, which Donald Culross Peattie compared to olive wood. Sometimes it happens, wrote Peattie, that fancy grains develop—feather-crotches, as the veneer salesman calls them—or a small black-mottled figure eagerly sought out. A decorated crotch, where the trunk and canopy diverge, is rare—maybe two or three per carload. When unrolled from the log, they appear like sheets of living flame. When finished in "natural" or in slightly brownish tones, paneling of feather-crotch Aspen wood is sought out by department stores as the perfect background for displaying fine feminine apparel. I'll search for the feathered aspen crotch on my next visit to Saks Fifth Avenue or Victoria's Secret, which hopefully won't be anytime soon. Most likely, the paneling in department stores and Peattie's excellent tree book are heirlooms of the late 1940s.
Around my house, nesting flickers and sapsuckers prefer aspen wood. Even chickadees may excavate a cavity in a rotten snag.
Blue jay, less concerned about the nature of aspen, perches on a limb, surrounded by swollen catkins. Leans back, bill slightly open, and displays thespian talents. Echoes a broad-winged hawk—an Amazonian migrant, weeks away— a long, high-pitched whistle that washes over me—a well-honed note, commandeering an otherwise dull morning.
"an otherwise dull morning" I'll give you that much - for an April Fool's Day... until you intervened with "feathered aspen crotch" at Saks Fifth Avenue or Victoria's Secret. Don't imagine they get too many rural VT naturalist types wandering in to look at wood?
"Useless for firewood," - My mother called poplar a summer wood. When one needed to use the wood kitchen stove (all she had to bake or roast) one desired a wood that burned hot and fast. As soon as the chef stopped feeding the fire the fire went out and left few coals. The kitchen would cool off in time for supper.