Looking for signs of spring

Since spring began March 20, temperatures have soared into the upper 60s, the ice has melted from Lake Mendota and much has sprung to life — including people, plants and wildlife.

Open channels of water form, and plates of fractured ice jam up along the shoreline of Lake Mendota.

A rhubarb plant is one of more than 100 potted and budding perennial plants that Department of Botany staff load into a van for transport to the greenhouse. These plants were dug up in October from the Botany Garden, which is undergoing renovations, and stored in a forestry department refrigerated facility. Gambling that the nights of hard frost are past, botany staff will shelter the perennials outdoors and replant them in the late spring after trees and shrubs are planted in the renovated garden.

Taking advantage of a mild day, professor Jim Donnelly’s history class abandons the less-than-airy confines of the Mosse Humanities Building, meeting instead on Bascom Hill to discuss shamanism and spirit possessions. “We know we’re setting a precedent down here today and we’re enjoying it!” Donnelly says.

During the season’s first bird-banding effort by the Biocore Prairie Bird Observatory at Picnic Point, volunteer Katie Fitzmeier records information about this American goldfinch, including its species, sex, age, weight, condition and measurements of wing, beak, feet and tail. Caught in mist nets temporarily set up in the Biocore Prairie restoration area and an unrestored grassland control plot nearby, the birds are tagged with numbered U.S. Geological Society bands. Data are reported annually to the Bird Banding Laboratory in Patuxent, Md., and used by local researchers studying migration patterns and exploring possible correlations to the restoration of the Biocore Prairie. For information on becoming a bird-banding volunteer, contact Mara McDonald, mamcdona@wisc.edu, 263-8941.

Cast upon the Lakeshore Path, shadows from bare trees and a passing runner are signs that warmer weather is near.