(HOST) Never mind the TS Eliot quote that April is the cruelest month – here in Northern New England March can be pretty tough – full of wintery weather. But nature writer and commentator Ted Levin assures us that spring is indeed on the way – and it’s traveling north.
(LEVIN) Even as the temperature falls and the snow-pack rises spring ineluctably creeps forward. I saw it recently along the highways and byways of the East Coast.
In late January, when I drove to Virginia, I first noticed turkey vultures above southern New Jersey, rocking back and forth, buoyed by a column of hot air rising off the macadam. Red-tailed hawks were along the interstate from Massachusetts to Maryland. And when I reached Virginia, I found red-shouldered hawks and kestrels perched on fence posts along country roads and resident red-tailed hawks were establishing territories. Flocks of bluebirds roamed hedgerows and juncos gathered at feeders.
Three weeks later, in the middle of February, I drove to Virginia again. En route, I spotted my first redtail hawk perched in a maple just south of Springfield and counted several more before I reached the Massachusetts border. Riding the wind north, turkey vultures had already reached central Connecticut, while red-shouldered hawks had penetrated as far north as Delaware and Maryland.
Large flocks of Canada geese – or should I call them herds – grazed pond-side pastures throughout the Middle Atlantic States. A few kingfishers and great blue herons had reached Goose Creek outside of Middleburg, Virginia, where there had been none in January. I spotted my first flicker as it flew from one open-field tree to the next, and song sparrows had joined juncos at Virginia feeders. Tufted titmice, still silent in Vermont, sang and Carolina wrens yelled. And Carolina chickadees, which are almost indistinguishable from our black-capped chickadees . . . until they open their mouths, whistled their four-note song.
The Virginia red-tailed hawks that I had watched in January were courting and nest building. Once morning, I found a pair perched side by side on adjacent limbs of a large white oak, their arm-full of sticks nest ever so obvious in the leafless woods.
One evening, just before sunset, as I walked with a friend to a grocery in Middleburg, flocks of hundreds of chattering robins pitched into a line of ornamental junipers in front of us. In a moment or so we realized that the these birds were actually a subset of a much larger flock of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of robins descending on Middleburg. For the rest of my stay in Virginia I saw flocks robins everywhere – on lawns, roadways, hedgerows, and high overhead.
Two weeks later, on the first of March, I noticed my first New England robins, a flock in a crabapple tree outside a restaurant in Exeter, New Hampshire, and while above a nearby highway a turkey vulture rocked on the drafts of a frigid nor’easter.
When I filled my birdfeeders this morning I heard a hairy woodpecker tattooing a resonant limb and the sweet two-note descending whistle of a chickadee, both unmistakable signs that the subtle, ever-increasing length of daylight has triggered our earliest stirrings of spring.