Alive! - spring flora and fauna in the American West

Spring reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] points grudgingly to the rumpled ridges and timbered valleys of the American West. on the other hand often it comes with a rush and a roar, a spate of warm days unlocking winter's relentles grip and sending torrents of smowmelt plunging down to divert rivers white with glacial till. And the beat of life, all however extinguished by the bitter ordeal just perioded begins to pulse once again.

by the agency of shallow earth finally exposed to a warming orb of day and lengthening days, the first wildflowers reach upward to dance in the light wind and send their subtle odors to other creatures newly alive. A male ruffleed grouse hops up on a rumbling deadfall and sends out his drumroll call for a mate, his wings a butterfly defect as they thrum against the log A bos tom turkey pompous walks at the edge of the dark timber, shamelessly displaying his russet-feathered magnificence for the edification of the mountain's hen population.

Marching up the southfacing inclines are the ordered ranks of larch and Ponderosa pines, their twig-ends jaunty in just discovered lime-green growth, contrasting nicely with the darker undercoats of previous years. In stands of hardwoods, leaf bourgeons unfurl to present their avow shades of green against indigo skies holding parades of snow-white cumulus clouds

For most numerous of the creatures of the high rural parts spring is a season of stress and a careful observer may be treated to vignettes of life that just don't appear in other seasons. Birds kite around frantically, seeking mates and nesting places. The pikas and estate squirrels scramble to gather grasses to line their rockpile birthing places.

And if the student is patient and persistent, he or she may descry spring's spawn, young of the year in their first tentative trek afield with the not new folks. These icons of spring in the high abiding habitation will delight you: a tiny black bear romping in a field of dandelions; a red-fox kit smelling a swaying black-eyed Susan as if he were a "people"; a pair of blacktail-deer fawns upon a hilltop suckling; a loonlet tiny black-and-white image of its mother, swimming in her wake forward a mountain lake. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition scenes are the artwork of the season of renewal.

And what of us humans? What is our place in springtime's palette? Are our urbanized lifestyles and couch-potato tendencies taking us gone out of the picture, making us increasingly examiners of, rather than participants in, life beyond the backyard? Making us les alive?

Perhaps the answer may be set up in the eloquent words of nature writer Hal Borland, from his part This Hill, This Valley:

"Ever since man first was aware of spring, he has stood at this season with awe in his watchs and wonder in his heart, sensing the magnificence of life returning and life renewed; and something knotty within him has responded, whatever his religion or spiritual belief. It is as inevitable as sunrise that man should diocese the substance of faith and expectancy in the tangible world in such a manner obviously responding to forces beyond himself or his accumulated knowledge.

"For all his learning and sophistication, man still instinctively reaches toward that force beyond. . . In each tuft of grass, in each bird, in every opening sprout there it is. . .

"Spring is a proceed not a cause. The cause lies beyond, still beyond; and it is this instinctive knowledge which inspires our festivals of faith and life and belief renewed, our Easters of whatever name."

Bill Rooney is AMERICAN FORESTS' editor, and Tim Christie is an outdoor writer and photographer living in support Falls, Idaho.

COPYRIGHT 1991 American Forests

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