Spring Sounds

I went out into our school backyard one evening last week looking for signs of spring.  The path and woods were alive with all sorts of things --there were mushrooms and mosses and fragile (actually probably very sturdy) sprouts here and there.  Buds were just beginning to appear on the trees and shrubs.  I scared up a rabbit that was perhaps the very one who left prints in the snow this past winter for my class and I to find with great delight.  But the most remarkable thing to me on that walk were the sounds.  I felt a bit like I was in the midst of hundreds of conversations that I couldn't quite decipher.  A foreigner in a foreign land.  Instinct (and spring) told me the conversations were mating and territorial calls . . . everyone finding their purpose and place.  I walked with the generalized feeling of being in the midst of many demanding voices after a long winter wait.  I recorded the above songs coming out of the wetlands.  It was the sound of two individuals calling in the early evening.  When you hear a whole chorus of these, you know what they are . . . but that evening, I wasn't sure if these impressive first soloists were bird or frog.  Thankfully, I emailed Russ Schipper, who graciously identified the sounds . . . spring peepers!!!!  A couple days later, the whole wetland area was screaming these sounds and spring seems in a full, all out ruckus.  Thank God!  It has been a long winter!  Happy spring to the peepers, and all those of us who have waited patiently (and not so patiently) for a sign of new life!