Stonefly, Babcock Ridge

After writing all morning—reluctantly, I might add; I wanted to get out on the snow in advance of, sigh, a warming and rainy trend in tonight's forecast—I grabbed my snowshoes for a long trek on the trails of the Babcock Ridge and Erisman Woodlands preserves. I didn't really have an agenda, save seeing whether it might be possible to use the trails for public walks in the snow—definitely OK for snowshoes, probably too tricky to navigate on skis for all but the very-experienced... and intrepid—but aside from that assessment objective, I just wanted the exercise... and the possibility of spotting something interesting. Except for an handful of Bluebirds and Chickadees, the birds were elsewhere and the two deer I noticed were well out of camera range. But as the temperature nudged freezing—the outside temp... I was well on my way to sweating—there were a few Craneflies in the air, and once I noticed those spindly-legged hardy insects, I scanned the snow for others. I'm guessing this Stonefly had been sleeping in the leaf litter and interpreted the snow-melt as a sign to come above-ground and test the air for an indication that it was time to head to the streams to mate. I'm not fooling myself into believing that the plecopteran was predicting an early spring. An early January thaw, maybe, but there's still a long time to go before the Vernal Equinox... a long, long time.