All of us who have been enduring winter’s cold, snow, or freezing rain are looking for any hint that this is all coming to an end. Here in the northern Adirondack foothills, there’s a hint that spring will someday arrive. The air smells different at dawn, with a tang of new life, perhaps carried north from more temperate regions. Birds are more vocal as they assemble in flocks after roosting through night in sheltered areas. They know the season will change soon. Chickadees are singing the fee-bee song, woodpeckers are tapping out their breeding territories, and the squirrels are frisking in the trees. On the other end of the Adirondack Mountains, though, spring is even closer. Photographer Tony Jancek has been getting out as often as he can to take photos of this much anticipated shift in seasons. Here are some of his pictures.

 

Ice clings to rocky walls, perhaps attracting climbers equipped with crampons and ice axes, but these frozen waterfalls are on borrowed time as the days lengthen and temperatures rise:

 
Fog may hang tough over the hills, but that doesn’t deter this feisty red squirrel from keeping track of what’s happening on his patch:

 
Spotty snow remains in shady areas and in the woods of the southeastern Adirondack foothills, but the fields are bare of this burden, and attract hungry whitetail deer. Here a family dine on last year’s growth of alfalfa:

 
A mallard hen with three nattily dressed suiters patrol an ice-free pond. If she hasn’t already done so, she will soon mate with one of the drakes and will raise a brood of ducklings in a nest built on the ground in one of the surrounding fields:

 
Not all the ponds are free of ice, including this one:

 
Look carefully, and you’ll see that there’s a whole lot of activity going on. At least four beavers—a family of two parents and at least two young live in the dome-shaped lodge—are enjoying a delicious meal of bark and aquatic roots. Here are three of them, two in the foreground, and one beyond the lodge:

 
And here are two more:

 
Look closely and you can see the fingers of the near beaver’s hands as he grasps a limb so he can chew the bark off the branch which the beavers set aside in autumn. Beavers build caches of branches in the bottom of ponds so that they can eat through the winter when ice sheaths the water from shore to shore. (Read more about beavers in “The Living Legacy of the North American Beaver” and “Voices from the Wild: Busy as a Beaver.”)

Watching a family of beavers enjoying a meal in broad daylight is a delight, and to add to the thrill, a bald eagle banks overhead as scans the pond with his sharp eyes, searching for his own meal, one of fish:

 
Now that’s a sighting to raise one’s spirit as we wait for spring to take hold for good.

 
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