The official beginning of spring will occur less than three weeks from today on Thursday, March 19. This is an unusual date for the recognition of the vernal equinox, but the fact that this year is a leap year makes it ever so slightly unusual to start with. Then add in the rather odd weather that we’ve had this winter and I think it is fair if any of us is feeling a little out or sorts.
Winter hadn’t even begun when we had our largest snowstorm of the year. It was only Dec. 2, right in the meaty part of the beginning of the end of autumn, when just about 2 feet of snow fell on my yard. School was canceled and I was bracing myself for what I thought might be an “old fashioned winter” with regular, deep snow cover like the winters I remember from my childhood. But, for better or worse, that was not how things turned out.
I only ended up needing my snowblower two other times (so far) and we seemed to slip right into a prolonged period of time where the weather felt more like March than anything. I keep track of high and low temperatures on a daily basis and I have been waiting for the temperature to finally fall below zero for the first time. For now, I will have to keep waiting. We’ve come close on a couple of mornings, but so far, I haven’t recorded anything below zero.
This, again is a little odd. Over the past nine years, I have recorded the first day with a temperature below zero sometime in December or January, with early January holding a slight lead. There have only been three occasions in the past nine years when the temperature dropped below minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, with the coldest temperature recorded on Feb. 14, 2015, at minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve only been keeping these sorts of records for about a decade, so I am very much aware that it has been colder than that in the past. I personally remember temperatures below minus 20 back in the ‘90s.
Well, I suppose I find it comforting that there is still a “pattern” of sorts that one can see in the weather. At my house, this year’s lowest temperature was zero degrees Fahrenheit and it was recorded on Feb. 15. At the time, I was “bracing” to go outside and all of the guests at my house were suitably impressed with the “extreme weather of the north.” The wood stove was cranking away and after experiencing the cold for themselves, everyone came in and enjoyed the warmth of the house with coffee or cocoa.
A week later, we experienced temperatures in the 50s and we could all start looking forward to the end of winter. The clouds returned and the temperature dropped back to a little warmer than normal, but it certainly did feel like the groundhog had seen his shadow and we would have several more weeks of winter weather. But just as all of this was happening, there was a subtle occurrence that provided another comforting bellwether of normalcy.
On Monday, Feb. 17 I recorded the appearance of the first red-winged blackbird of the year. There was a single male that arrived at my feeders and he appeared to have ridden in behind that (to date) coldest day of the year like a surfer catching a big wave. The temperature was a rather lovely 44 degrees that day and I also noted that there were suddenly bluebirds all over the place.
A couple of days later, the red-winged blackbird was joined by another and then on Thursday, Feb. 20 there were suddenly common grackles all over my yard. With no solid pattern of weather this year, it was a little difficult to determine if this felt normal or not. However, a quick visit to my “first sightings” page confirmed that this was well within the realm of precedent. Although both species were on the early side of things, both arrived at what could be described as “normal early.”
So, fear not my friends. The world may feel like it’s going a little haywire, but for the time being, it isn’t all that out of whack. It’s been a somewhat mild winter, with less snow than average, and the birds are arriving on the normal side of early. There may yet be more snow, but I will be extremely interested to see if this normalcy continues into April with the arrival of eastern phoebes and tree swallows. Both of those species come from much further distances and may not be able to respond to mild weather in the same way that our blackbirds have.
Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 22 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit www.speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook