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fiddlehead season, 2026
Saturday, April 18 2026

Late this morning I took Charlotte for a walk down the Stick Trail, and I brought my camera so I could get photos of all the lovely fiddleheads that have suddenly appeared. I almost never walk the entire length of the Stick Trail, but today I walked most of it. The trail crosses a deep gulch in the section where it heads northwestward towards the parcel that belongs to the farm at the end of the Farm Road (this gulch is most infamous for being the place where Eleanor found Ray & Nancy's dog Suzy after Suzy became disoriented — she was by then quite senile), and at this gulch, I turned northward and left the trail, passing through a large block of forest where there is no trail. Recently a surveyor came through and re-surveyed the boundary between private property and property belonging to Catskill State Park. The private property in this case is a large parcel adjacent to the the parcel belonging the Farm Road farm and the owner (a scion of a former major landowner in the Esopus Valley) that is supposedly on the market for $700,000, and this naturally gives us a certain amount of dread. (The surveyor also surveyed the parcel's other boundaries, all of them with private parcels, though those lines are much less obvious, and the Stick Trail crosses two of the parcel's boundaries.)

At some point Gretchen started messaging me to tell me how things were going with the direct action people trying to shut down a factory farm raising beagles for medical experiments near Madison, Wisconsin. A planned training session had been canceled due to a tornado warning, and then today suddenly the organizers decided to do the action a day early, perhaps to take the facility by surprise. What ended up happening was a logistical mess. The protestors were met by numerous police and blocked by layers of barricades. Unlike last time, nobody was able to breach the facility, and Gretchen said she almost vomited from all the tear gas and pepper spray. And one of the people on her team suffered a broken hand after being hit a short range by a rubber bullet. Suffice it to say, few of the action's objectives were met and no dogs were liberated. Later this evening, Gretchen sent me live video of her participation in a march. At the time I was snuggling with Neville on the laboratory beanbag.

This afternoon, I managed to get both dogs to come with me on a walk down the Gullies Trail. This time I brought the small GreenWorks (worst tool brand ever!) battery-powered chainsaw and did some trail maintenance, cutting through many trees that had fallen across the trail over the course of its first half mile or so. I then cleared a recent tree fall across the Stick Trail near where I'd finished work on the Gullies Trail. The dogs seemed to find things to do while I was doing these things, so it wasn't completely boring for them.

This evening I drank white wine (left over from the Pat Ryan event in Woodstock) and watched various crime interrogations on YouTube (the one where a homely woman murdered her father and hid his body beneath a concrete slab in the basement was particularly good).

Fern fiddleheads along the Stick Trail less than a quarter mile from home. Click to enlarge.

More fern fiddleheads. Click to enlarge.

Witchhazel leaves unfurling. Click to enlarge.

Unfurling fiddleheads. Click to enlarge.

Azure bluets (Houstonia caerulea) about a mile down the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.

Unfurling hickory buds over a mile from home. Click to enlarge.

More unfurling hickory buds over a mile from home. Click to enlarge.

A deep gulch crossing the Stick Trail a mile and a quarter from home. Click to enlarge.

A dead tree in the forest far from any trail. Click to enlarge.

Fresh woodpecker holes in a long-fallen tree. Click to enlarge.

The west part of the Chamomile Wall. The tree on the left is a black gum. Click to enlarge.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260418

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