“A team of researchers analyzed data going back decades about the tropicbird population and sightings of it, and found that since the 1950s the average date of the first observation of a white-tailed longtail is now 20 to 25 days earlier, a one-day shift every three years. That means the birds are now arriving in Bermuda in February, not March.”
I planted potatoes for the first time ever BEFORE St. Patrick’s Day. The greater blue heron has returned to its aerie a full two weeks earlier than ever before. Catkins on the hazel nuts were early surviving even below zero temps.
Finally, here is a poem I wrote about early Spring several springs ago:
Vernal not Viral
A vernal virus,
the temperature in our ground is rising,
warming by quarter degrees,
infecting us all
from concave to convex,
from gerund to verb,
from male to female and back again.
Even in masks
we are unmasked,
we’re itching
to be
unveiled
to the vernal,
showing our naked sprung selves
to the gyre and whirl
all about us.
running, playing, lazing in the sun,
we are magnified by a lens
of our own making,
sunned and tanned and lasered by
the rising, warm, yeasty tide of fermentation,
not viral violence,
instead a hoedown of stomping and hooting.
Like cats we look for that puddle of light
that will evaporate
the cold and dark of winter’s shadow,
a shimmer that happens first
on the wall of my log home,
a letter written with nine-light-minute ink
on logs likely to have grown
before our wee mewing Republic
was nary a glimmer,
creating a tunnel of green,
Pan, at the helm,
burrowing with borrowed light
at the gates of dawn
straight into the bloody, raw Spring,
toward but not reaching Summer…
not yet.
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Like Daniel, I did not see this the first time you posted it. Your observations made me think of a book I read a couple of months ago called Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by biologist Thor Hanson. He describes the reactions/changes taking place among animals and plants due to climate change. His analysis is more hopeful than some I’ve read.
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Reminds me of this clip from “The Big Lebowski”. Gaia also abides.
https://youtu.be/sYsw0KVRjCM?si=W-iRy50M4RMYH0p3