After breeding, mallard males leave the females to care for their 9-13 white eggs. Drakes (males) have a bright green head, while hens (females) are a drab brown. If you look closely at a drake’s tail, you will find that a few of the feathers are curled.
A hen makes her nest on the ground near water and under the cover of vegetation and brush. The eggs will hatch in about a month, and the hen will then lead her ducklings into the water where they will stay for the rest of the summer.
Did you know? Ducklings are able to feed themselves after they hatch, and eat vegetation, grain, worms, insects, and snails.
Learn more: Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Eastern cottontails may have as many as six litters in a year, with 5-6 young in each litter! Before she has her young, the female will make a nest in a depression in the ground and line it with grasses and fur from her chest. The young kits will leave this nest at 7 weeks old, and the female will have her next litter.
Eastern cottontails are mainly nocturnal and eat a variety of plants. To escape predators such as coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, and weasels, they can leap as far as 15 feet.
Did you know? Cottontails have a short lifespan of about a year and a half, but can mate when they are just 3 months old.
Learn More: Animal Diversity Web
As spring days become longer, special hormones are released in the bodies of bucks. These hormones cause them to grow new antlers and thicken their neck muscles to carry the extra weight...3-9 pounds worth!
Early antlers are covered with fuzzy skin (called velvet) full of nerves and circulating blood. This covering nourishes the antlers as they grow over the next five months. Antlers are very sensitive as they grow, so bucks avoid bumping them.
By early fall, the antlers stop growing and the bone in them dies. At this point the velvet dries up and comes off, and the antlers are no longer sensitive. The bucks will then use their antlers to spar with other bucks over does. In early winter, as the days shorten, hormone levels in the buck's body make them lose or shed their antlers. If they can make it through the winter, they will begin the whole process again next spring.
Did you know? The size of a buck's antlers depend upon both genetics and nutrition.
Round-lobed hepatica blooms from April to May in wooded areas. Many woodland wildflowers bloom early in the spring, which allows them to take advantage of full sunlight before the trees produce leaves and shade the forest floor. Hepatica leaves used to be boiled into a tea for liver disorders, simply because the leaves were shaped like a liver. Luckily, this type of diagnosis is no longer in practice!
Learn More: Freckmann Herbarium
Garlic mustard is an alien invader from Europe that produces hundreds of seeds per plant. It will completely take over an area, eliminating the native wildflowers there. Its leaves appear in early April, and its small white flowers bloom from May to June.
The plant is a biennial, which means that it has a two-year lifecycle. The first year it only produces leaves, and in the second it also produces flowers. It likes shaded, moist woods and wooded edges, and its leaves and stems smell like garlic when crushed.
Did you know? This plant has become a large problem in many areas of the state, and parks and wildlife areas have begun organizing "pulling parties" in which volunteers work to remove it. Garlic mustard seeds can remain viable (able to grow) in the soil for 5 years, making it difficult to completely get rid of.
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