The Birds Are Back in Town...
The first robins arrived about two weeks ago, optimistic opportunists who entered with a song and were greeted with a blizzard. According to Tom Skilling, a Chicago weatherman whose earnest passion for meteorological detail never fails to amaze, we have had almost twice as many “measurable snow days” this year (42) as last year (22): “The most in 27 years.”
Yet, after months of shoveling, car-scraping and ice-chipping, all the evidence is gone. Mini-Himalayas that had been plowed into place along the sides of roads have disappeared into thin air and damp ground. Those early birds are feeling pretty darn smart now…
And full. Robins follow a 35-degree isotherm on their trek north. That also happens to be the temperature cue for earthworms, cicada nymphs and other creatures of the deep to begin wriggling their ways upward from winter berths beneath the frost line. A northward migration meets a vertical migration just in time for dinner.
I learned that from a book published almost 60 years ago – “North to the Spring” – about a couple’s 17,000 mile zig-zag road trip chasing the season from Florida to the Canadian border in a gear / maps / and field guide-stuffed Buick. I had never heard of either the book or its author, Edwin Way Teale, but liked the title as I browsed an unexpectedly good used-book store in Monterey few weeks ago (Book Haven on Tyler street, near Peet’s Coffee and Trader Joe’s). I have been savoring it ever since, trying to stretch out my reading to match their meanders.
“...The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at an average rate of about fifteen miles per day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on a bank of a river and watches a stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north. We see all the phases of a single phase, all the variations of this one chapter in the Odyssey of Spring. My wife and I dreamed of knowing something of all the phases, of reading all possible chapters, of seeing, firsthand, the long northward flow of the season…”
Out my window, it’s still pretty early in the chapter. But Tom Skilling assures me that although it really could snow again today, the sunlight – even through the clouds – is “three times as strong as in December” and that “spells of warmth” are only a matter of weeks away. The birds are back. It must be true…
Yet, after months of shoveling, car-scraping and ice-chipping, all the evidence is gone. Mini-Himalayas that had been plowed into place along the sides of roads have disappeared into thin air and damp ground. Those early birds are feeling pretty darn smart now…
And full. Robins follow a 35-degree isotherm on their trek north. That also happens to be the temperature cue for earthworms, cicada nymphs and other creatures of the deep to begin wriggling their ways upward from winter berths beneath the frost line. A northward migration meets a vertical migration just in time for dinner.
I learned that from a book published almost 60 years ago – “North to the Spring” – about a couple’s 17,000 mile zig-zag road trip chasing the season from Florida to the Canadian border in a gear / maps / and field guide-stuffed Buick. I had never heard of either the book or its author, Edwin Way Teale, but liked the title as I browsed an unexpectedly good used-book store in Monterey few weeks ago (Book Haven on Tyler street, near Peet’s Coffee and Trader Joe’s). I have been savoring it ever since, trying to stretch out my reading to match their meanders.
“...The seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at an average rate of about fifteen miles per day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on a bank of a river and watches a stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north. We see all the phases of a single phase, all the variations of this one chapter in the Odyssey of Spring. My wife and I dreamed of knowing something of all the phases, of reading all possible chapters, of seeing, firsthand, the long northward flow of the season…”
Out my window, it’s still pretty early in the chapter. But Tom Skilling assures me that although it really could snow again today, the sunlight – even through the clouds – is “three times as strong as in December” and that “spells of warmth” are only a matter of weeks away. The birds are back. It must be true…
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