Gray, damp, windy. Storm brewing. Wild-rose buds bursting into fragrant white blossoms emitting that sweet, unmistakable scent that money can’t buy. I look forward to the two weeks it annually lingers, making our daily rambles all the more pleasant.

I should have known what was coming next. So predictable if you keep a journal. Yes, as is customary when the sweet fragrance of multiflora rose fills Sunken Meadow and my front yard, I can expect turtle migration from marsh to field to lay eggs. And, sure enough, there one was Monday morning, a wood turtle standing, perpendicular, right on my trodden trail. A big one, she’s the biggest I have ever encountered, and the first I ever heard hiss as she retracted her thick neck, head and all four clawed legs into an enclosed, solid defensive posture. I do hope she escapes mower blades that can’t be far away.

Last year you may recall I found two dead wood turtles, invisible victims of modern mowing machinery. Apparently that big, green, noisy mower didn’t get them all, though, a comforting thought. The protected marshland turtles wouldn’t be there if they didn’t serve an important role in the habitat, and the same can be said of their more aggressive cousins, snapping turtles, a big one of which I heard hit by a mower with my own ears last spring. It was a horrendous, crunching, grinding racket that jammed the machine to an abrupt halt, creating total momentary silence.

I think I had run into that turtle two or three previous springs before it finally ended up in a vulnerable place at the wrong time, which proved to be its last. Like I said last week about fawn carnage during mechanized haying season, these things didn’t happen in the old days when hay and grasses were cut with a curved, sweeping, long-wooden-handled farm tool called a scythe, which did the trick with far less death and destruction of field beasts.

Which brings us to a reader affectionately known by friends as “Sheik,” a man who, as he often has over the years when he has something to say, chimed in by email Sunday evening about freshly dropped fawns hidden in tall hayfields awaiting their first cut. As it turns out, he wrote to recount a two-day sequence of events that ended with a tiny spotted creature popping up from its
West Whately nest and cautiously walking away from him.

It all started Saturday when, during a pleasant after-supper evening walk from home with his wife, they spotted two deer run off in opposite directions from a field, and the pretty sight got his wheels spinning.

“I thought immediately of your column about fawns hiding in fields and was wondering if there were any there,” he wrote. “Then, about 20 minutes later, my wife heard coy dogs howling in the general area of our sighting and we hoped they hadn’t found a fawn.”

The next day, Sheik thought it high time to address a lingering project and took one of his boys for a quick ride across the field from which the deer had fled the previous day. The chore was to clear a large winter limb that had broken off and was still lying along the perimeter. Once there, he hollowed out a space in a patch of bittersweet vines along the edge to make room for a pile of smaller branches before attacking the downed limb with his chain saw. That’s when the cute little surprise popped up out of nowhere.

“When I went to start the chain saw, a spotted fawn jumped up a couple of feet from where I had just been working,” he wrote, astonished. “I can see why a farmer could run one over hiding in a hayfield. Curled up, they would be real hard to see. This one tiptoed away, hopefully to lie down and wait for its mother to return.”

So there you have it, fellas. It’s fawning season and some of the little ones are already on the ground. A telltale sign is tiny hoofprints the size of a quarter.

Since his sighting, the Sheik’s neighbor told him of a recent fawn playing tag in his yard with his little lap dog, which the Sheik took in stride, ending his message with, “I haven’t seen a hen turkey with a brood yet. But tis the season.”

Yes, indeed. Tis the season of birth and nests and the most nutrient-rich green growth of the year.
•
Speaking of deer, the farmer who owns the property I walk daily stopped Sunday morning to shoot the breeze about this and that. When we got to talking about mature, shoulder-high, blue-green winter rye with wheat-like seed heads he was cutting in his cornfield, plus the mix of grasses in his adjacent hayfields, I told him about the migration of spring deer I had witnessed to the lowlands the minute they smelled the deep green clover stubble clinging tightly to his hayfield soil.

“Yes,” he answered, nodding in agreement, then. “I counted 15 in the field one evening. There’s one big one among them.”

Yes siree. That’s a fact. He’s speaking of the buck mentioned here last week — the now 5-year-old I’ve watched since a spotted fawn still being nursed by its mother many summers back. That mature buck’s track, which I have seen many times, developed a distinctive, exaggerated splayed hoof print I am always on the lookout for.

That deer by now feels like a neighborhood pal, a night traveler running high and low, one that has likely had enough close encounters with hunters toting bows and guns over the years to have learned to avoid them. Sooner or later he’s likely to make a mistake. But it might not be for the benefit of human consumption. Perhaps a winter, deep- or icy-snow coyote pack or random passing automobile will ultimately get him. Then again, maybe he’ll succumb to old age in these days of a dwindling hunter pool.
•
Sticking to deer, good news from the wilds of New Hampshire, where the white-tailed deer population has shown zero evidence of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), based on data gathered during the 2014 hunting season.

First identified in 1978, CWD remained isolated in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska for about a decade, but has found its way a far east as New York, Pensylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Thus the concern in New England, where it has not yet reared its ugly head.
•
Oh yeah, before I go, back to the subject of snapping turtles. I saw one, medium sized, trying to cross Colrain Road north of Harper’s Store in the Greenfield Meadows Tuesday afternoon on my way into work. It reminded me of something a longtime friend shared with me last spring in response to a column I wrote. Not that I mentioned it in the column, but he was perplexed why he passes so many ugly messes in the road left by runover snappers.

“Why do people run them over?” he asked with anger in his voice. “They move slow and are easy to see and avoid. People must run them over on purpose.”

If you’re one of the people who do so, then you better hope my buddy isn’t around to witness it.

“If I ever catch anyone running one over, I’ll confront them with something like, “What the *&^% is wrong with you, anyway?

“It’s hard for me to understand people like that.”

He’s not alone.