The last couple of days a record 10 degrees above zero. The snow is gone, time to get out there.
A sunny morning, a spiderling drops from the eavestrough, blue-bottle fly on the glass of the deck. Chris and I head out to a few spots.
Nothing new, places we've been before, some still too deep in snow. But, digging up by a mine where we'd found some good quartz and silver ore he finds some amber. Not amber, precisely, but glassy resin in the dirt. Looking around I spot the bark it's dripped from, tear it down, when:
It begins an awful hissing and takes me a moment to figure out what it is. I would have thought - given the abundance of mines, that hibernation would take place a little deeper in the mountain, but maybe (hopefully!!!) this guy was an early riser.
Anyways, tuck him back near a hollow on the tree - hopefully he can resume his hibernation, not enough bugs out yet. And a reminder to be a little more careful traipsing about the woods, wouldn't want to prematurely wake up anything else.