The snow is still trickling away in little icy streams when the first willow pussies come out for an airing. You will not find them on the big willow trees, but on bundles of knobby switches of willow shrubs that grow with their little webby root feet in the water. The bark is a brownish-green satin, with gummy, scale-covered buds set at regular spaces along the slender, leafless stems.
These scales open, and furry gray noses poke out to take note of the weather. If the sun is shining, the pussies slip right out and sit, as if with toes and tails under them, like so many maltese kittens. You like to rub the silken pussies on your cheek, and you almost expect to hear them purr. But in a few days they swell and stretch and bristle, like kittens with their backs up about something, until every gray hair shows a grain of yellow pollen under it. Shake a twig and see the gold dust fly!
The big willow trees know better than to bloom so early, when Jack Frost nips foolish pussies. When the April sun is quite warm, the black willow takes the brown water-proof caps from its flower buds, and pushes out some catkin tails as scaly as pine cones. Each row of scales is dropped over the next lower one as neatly as the shingles on a church spire. They have no fur, for nobody needs fur in April. Under the scales are seed bottles with eggs in them, but no yellow pollen to feed them. Somewhere nearby, there is sure to be another black willow tree with no eggs, but with pollen catkins as yellow as gold. The bees visit both trees for honey, and so carry pollen to the eggs. The yellow tassels fall very soon, but the scaly ones stay on the trees awhile. By and by the seed babies under the scales get so big and downy that they tumble out of the nests and fly away.
All the catkin bearing trees—the willows, alders, birches and poplars, make these feathered seeds. In April and May, the woods are full of flying white flakes. One poplar is called the cottonwood because of the snow storm of downy seeds it sets loose. The alders are mostly shrubs, growing with the willows along the waterways. Their scaly, worm-like catkins, that you can see in winter, swell into long feathery tassels of purple and gold. On the same bushes are little erect cone-catkins that bear the seeds. The birches like drier soil. You know these white-barked wood fairies, don't you? The birches are shy, and so are their blossoms. You have to lift the thin scales of their catkins to find the thinner scales under them, and the hidden pollen. The tassel grows feathery, and the downy
