Fields Pond salmon!

ORRINGTON – Last weekend’s unseasonably warm weather brought out the need to get outside in many of us. Fields Pond was busy with ice fishermen, skiers and snowmobiles. One ice fishing party came up to report that a salmon had been caught in Fields Pond! Now Fields Pond is not known as a salmon lake, as it is a small, shallow pond raised by damming. We were a little skeptical. What is a salmon doing there?

Well, this was a small salmon and salmon are stocked in Brewer Lake, and Brewer Lake is connected to Fields Pond, though there is a dam between the two. Sooooo, a salmon could have navigated the outflow and ventured into Fields Pond or so the reasoning goes. You just never know what you might pull up through that ice!

A perfect winter day

Wednesday dawned cloudy and cold after a day and a half of light snow, but by 10 a.m. the clouds had broken up and the sun was shining. A perfect winter day was upon us. Three to four inches of new snow was on the ground and nearly 24 hours had elapsed since the last major flakes landed – tracking heaven!

Out in the field we were immediately puzzled by an unusual track. The animal was walking in a relatively straight line, but the prints were much too close and small to be a fox or a coyote. Some additional snow had fallen into the prints and it was difficult to see the pad arrangement, count the toes or to tell if any claws were present.

For 10 minutes we followed the trail and suggested exciting possibilities. The trail eventually came back along the south wall of the Nature Center building. This animal had hugged the wall and sure enough, left some nearly perfect paw prints. Good grief – a cat! Could it be a bobcat? We wish. No, this was most likely an ordinary, albeit large, house cat. Fooled again!

Alder cones

Back across the field we went to search along the tree line. Intrigued by the alder catkins hanging down one of the guides wanted to stop for a closer look. Our resident tree expert pointed out the difference between the “male catkins” and “female flowers” of the speckled alder. Both are a rich mahogany color as they await spring. The tiny female alder flowers will eventually grow to become the “cone-like structures” that children and adults alike love to pick. They look like miniature pinecones.