Visit Indian Creek Nature Center to Enjoy Nature in Every Season!
Experience hiking, snowshoeing, skiing, bird watching and environmental education programs throughout the year!
Autumn
The summer song of the cicadas has been replaced by the slow chirping of crickets hidden in the hedgerows. In the uplands, sandhill cranes stroll through mowed fields probing the ground in search of insects and seeds.
The Virginia creeper, encircling the trunk and branches of elm and maple, turns crimson and too ripe apples fall to the ground from heavily laden apple trees. The apples, bursting with sweet pulp are soon found by yellow jackets and small, brown, furry mice and then by a vixen who spies and then pounces.
The temperatures begin to drop at night and soon frost blankets the ground. The green of the vegetation gives way to brown as it bends ever closer to the ground. Owls hoot their conversations and geese call overhead as they move through on starlit nights, some stopping settling on the marsh and some just passing through. Even with the geese, the landscape is strangely quiet after the summer cacophony, as many of the breeding birds have migrated toward their wintering grounds. Eagle and osprey nests stand empty, and young loons stay behind on the lake, the adults having already left, trusting that their young will follow once they are old enough to fly.
Walking through the hardwoods, the air is crisp and the leaves crunch underfoot. Soon there will be snow, but for now it’s autumn on the marsh...
Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)
Image by Guilles Ayotte, Creative Commons license
View from the Upland Trail in winter 2022 - Photo by J. Ozard
Winter
The marsh is quiet now, the woods and wetlands seem to be sleeping beneath a blanket of snow. The silence is broken only by the squeak of the snow beneath your feet until a grouse explodes from its hiding place amid the alder, and then another and another!
Further along the trail, high up in a sugar maple, a white-breasted nuthatch calls out. As you look out across the marsh a tiny wisp of steam escapes from the top of a beaver lodge, betraying the occupants hidden inside.
Tucked in among the cattails, smaller mounds of snow mark muskrat houses dotting the marsh.
Back in the woods, troughs made by waddling porcupines crisscross the forest floor and tracks of snowshoe hares offer clues to other residents now out of sight. Wild grapes stain the snow beneath thick overhead vines and coyote scat, bristling with fur, reveal some of their recent meals. It’s winter at Indian Creek!
Spring
We move from the season in which the earth is covered in a blanket of (mostly) white snow, with the dark greens of pines and hemlocks and the brown-grey of dormant trees, to the season of vibrant spring greens and the early colors of violets, trout lilies, and Northern blueflag.
The earthy smell of the forest reawakening in spring is lovely and invigorating, while the smell of amorous striped skunks is not so pleasant, but nonetheless a sign of spring!
Migrating spring birds will turn Indian Creek into a riot of both sound and color.
Trumpeter swans return to nest near the Nature Center every spring