February 26, 1973
The ice at Farmington Bay was splitting and cracking like a giant seed pod responding to the urge to germinate. Snow had disappeared from the surface ice and more water was exposed. Hundreds of carp, five to fifteen pounders, trapped beneath the ice in the shallow bays during the hard freeze, had suffocated. Gulls were feeding voraciously on the fish that were partly or wholly exposed. As the ice melts, the dead carp float to the banks where they will be available to scavengers. The carcasses will eventually sink and be flushed from the streams to become organic material for further enrichment of the marsh.
The muskrats (actually big meadow mice) were much in evidence, their heads barely above water, as they swam to and fro from their mounds. As a result, the activities of the muskrat trappers were increased with a good take of pelts. The trappers pay a fee of $150 for the privilege of trapping in this area. We watched the trappers, geared in chest waders, slog out into the marsh to check their traps. Each carried a heavy stick or rod which is used to expertly dispatch a trapped muskrat. The "catch" we looked at were in their prime, the fur a rich brown and almost black in some cases. Because of their abundance, and the beauty and durability of the fur, they are the most valuable of fur bearing animals. Trapping is a control measure here at Farmington Bay because the muskrat, since it is a burrower, does considerable damage by undermining the dikes and dams. The traps will be taken up before the females have their young (about thirty young are produced in a season), and soon after the bird migrations begin, to prevent the ducks and geese being caught and injured in the traps. We saw one Canadian honker flying about with a muskrat trap attached to one foot. We never miss the opportunity to chat with trappers, because they are observant of the creatures in the marsh, and generally have appreciation for them. They also have a good evaluation of the marsh as an important contributor to our ecology. One trapper told us that the male muskrats fight each other vigorously for territorial rights, and were now beginning to "stake out" their claims. (Editor's note: Dr. E. Laurence Palmer, in Field Book of Natural History, says they "are probably polygamous".)
The muskrat has few predators except the hawk, which will sometimes take a young one. However, last April we observed a long-tailed weasel emerge dripping wet from the shallows near a muskrat mound with a newly born muskrat in its mouth. He ran along the dike about three hundred yards and deposited the body at the entrance of his den. He returned to swim to the mound and enter it five more times, each time bringing out a baby muskrat. On our return hike around the dike, we counted six small black hairless bodies with yet unopened eyes at the mouth of the weasel's den. A week later the bodies were still there uneaten.
The mounds, or lodges, are made of cattails and reeds which the muskrat heaps up well above the waterline, and with an underwater entrance. The mounds serve not only as a home, but are utilized for food as well -- a case of having their house and eating it too. In the winter when we examined one of the mounds, it was frozen so solidly that no predator, unless it would be a bear-sized one, could possibly tear it down.

March 4
Today, as we walked along one dike, hundreds of spiders ran from the salt grass into shallow snow cover as their delicate "ears" picked up the vibrations of our footsteps. The green leaves (rosettes) of the hemlock (waterhemlock) had visibly grown since our last trek. And the migrations were in ! Six to eight hundred whistling swans were resting on the ice, and others had begun feeding. Flocks of Canadian geese flew back and forth. Several pairs were already declaring their nesting sites. Green winged teal and cinnamon teal were whirling everywhere in small flocks. Six canvasback drakes attended one hen.

As I sat on the bank of a spillway and looked to the northwest end of the bay, the sky and the trees and houses below seemed to be swaying. (Was I perhaps too tired after a seven mile walk?) Binoculars told me that thousands of pintails had just arrived. By the time we neared this area, the ducks had settled down and we heard their soft gabbling. They broke up into smaller flocks after resting a while, and flew to other areas of the bay. We were delighted and amused to see a bald eagle flying with a flock of thirty five pintails, his slow wing beat keeping perfect pace with the faster one of the ducks. The eagle stayed with them as far as we were able to follow their flight.
Wading in the shallows were the first avocets we had seen. A wash of cinnamon was just beginning to show on the upper breast. I thought of the book of Eskimo poetry, "I Breathe a New Song", in which the Eskimo expresses his inward joy at being alive and seeing the earth and the weather and the "great day that dawns". That seemed to me to be the perfect summation of the arrival of Spring In the Marsh.
-- by Leah T.Foerster