The ice formed late this year on Great and Little Bay. From my window overlooking the shores of the bay in Greenland, I watched as throughout February the ice spread out over the mudflats and the brackish water until only the deep channel of the Furber strait was visible.

All along the shelf of ice, gulls -- herring and black-back -- would perch and preen. A few brave ones would go into the water but soon join the others on the ice. Several times this winter a bald eagle passed over the gulls, causing much panic. Once in a while I caught sight of several small flocks of goldeneyes and black ducks out in the channel but their numbers were down from previous years. The ice-fishing bob houses lined the tidal rivers making small and colorful villages out on the ice.

All through February and into the first week or so of March the ice stayed firm and thick. Then suddenly one morning, great continents of ice were on the move. The ice closest to the channel went first and the channel widened as the tides carried in the water from the Piscataqua.

Soon ice from the Squamscott in Exeter and the Lamprey in Newmarket started appearing in the open water. Fast-moving chunks, some of them as big as rafts, floated down through the bay. Most fishermen moved their bob houses up on the shore, but one or two seemed to be caught in the melting ice and no one dared to go out to drag them off the slushy surface.

Then the ice along the mud flats, having been undermined by the tides, started to break off the shore. Some of it tipped up into large sheets on top of smaller pieces and ice sculptures formed all along the banks. Jagged shapes pushed onto one another with each high tide, poised with sharp points at every angle.

Within two days the points rounded out, the shapes softening as they melted down into each other. On the outer edge, geometric pieces of ice broke off and floated down with the tides, joining smaller chunks coming from the rivers. Still, like a lacy petticoat, fringes of ice lingered around the marsh, though in some places it was no longer dense and white, but clear like glass.

More and more open water became visible and I could see Canada geese in large flocks out in the middle. And then one morning in mid-March, I looked out the window and the ice was gone. Waves of water moved into the marsh and over the mudflats. The small tidal creeks started running again out to the bay. Redwing blackbirds could be seen and heard in last year's phragmites reeds. Although an invasive plant, this tallest of all the marsh plants retained its seedy plume that attracts the birds. The green stubble of salt marsh hay, cord and black grasses is now visible through the wrack line of last year's storms. On the edges of the little pools found throughout the marsh called salt pannes, instead of ice, I see mallards repairing a nest.

Spring seems to take so long to come. But on Great Bay, when the ice goes out, spring is here.

By Sheila Roberge, Volunteer Writer 4/11/07
Roberge works as the volunteer coordinator for the Great Bay Discovery Center, the conservation-education headquarters for the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Greenland.