The first stimulus to assault my senses when I got out of the car in Bellevue Thursday night was the almost deafening trilling of chorus frogs, a sound that more than any other says spring in the midwest.

And so I wasn’t surprised to hear leopard frogs the next day in Fontenelle Forest, their tongue-clucking quacks another sure sign that winter was over. Painted Turtles, too, emerged as the day warmed, and I glimpsed a snake’s tail disappearing into the grass at one point, too big to be Dekay’s snake and so probably a garter snake of one species or another.

Far and away the day’s most impressive herps, though, were the snapping turtles. Though they probably can’t snap a broomstick or take off a hand–cherished mythologies to the contrary–these animal do attain an impressive bulk in southeast Nebraska, and to see their weird angular forms slogging through the mud is a reminder of a prehistoric past when a foreign megafauna still crept around.

(Click here for a video of one in Fontenelle Forest last Friday.)

It’s rare, however, in my experience to see a snapper haul out to sun. But that’s just what this mossy-backed fellow was doing.

That’s a very large cottonwood trunk it’s lying on, and the animal’s carapace was well into its second foot in length.

Just what a monster like this eats, I couldn’t say, but I assume that small fish, frogs, even muskrats mind their surroundings when one of these shows up.

Eastern Nebraska’s snow had disappeared  by the time we arrived for Easter weekend, but the wildflower season was still anything but advanced.

A few early bloomers were poking up from the forest floor, though, among them Virginia waterleaf and Dutchman’s breeches–here surrounding a fine scarlet cup fungus.

We never did find a Hydrophyllum in bloom, but the Dicentra had started on some of the slopes in the Fontenelle Forest upland.

Claytonia leaves were everywhere in evidence, and there were a few widely scattered colonies in bloom.

It won’t be long until this spring beauty is joined by dozens of others in the Missouri River bluffs, from showy orchis to dogtooth violet. It’s been years–decades–since I’ve witnessed an entire flower season in the midwest, and the sight of the early blossoms this Easter weekend made me miss it, and envy a little those who have only to step outside.

Wonder what kind of  “pingbacks” that title will lead to.

One of my favorite trees when I was growing up in Nebraska–and one of my favorite trees even now–was the Kentucky coffee tree, a scarce but highly distinctive species found in a few scattered locations in the southeastern part of the state. It owes its generic name, Gymnocladus, to the coarse, clubby appearance of the branches, which are bare for much of fall, winter, and spring.

But it’s those great leathery pods, of course, that are most noticeable. Some individual trees, like the one above, in Fontenelle Forest, seem to hold on to them for months, while others drop them early in the cold season.

As children we loved to collect the smooth, hard “beans,” which are surrounded by a matrix of tacky green goo (to get all scientific about it).

Part of the charm of the tree is the story of these beans’ being used as a coffee substitute in ages past. I’m not sure I believe it (especially given that the rest of the plant is said to be not good for you at all), but it makes a good tale–and a beautiful tree.

No less formidable creature would dare to be as ugly as a snapping turtle.

But I’m not going to point that out, not even to this little one, caught napping in Fontenelle Forest, Nebraska, last week.

There are certain traditional phrases that are obligatory whenever you talk about these strong turtles. They’re always “as big as a washtub,” and they can always “snap a broomstick clear in two.” There are some big ones out there, but somehow I suspect that the thick handles of household implements have little to fear even from them.