February 2009 Archives

(for Ed Lenz....Welcome Back! We have missed you!)
One week to spring break and it still feels like winter. I am sitting at my writing desk watching a cold front blast across my hillside. The bird feeders are swinging wildly in the wind spilling their black, oil sunflower seeds all over the top of the seed husk pile that has built up on the ground over the winter. I will have to shovel those out later in March and talk to Ed about how to get the grass to grow in again! 

All right, there are two inches of snow out there right now and this morning when I woke up the radio announced a minus four degree wind chill. Maybe I started these "Signs of Spring" too early this year. No good deed ever goes unpunished. There are, though, some "spring-things" going on outside.

Like the male tufted titmice's singing and fighting for mating territory (my front yard bird feeder and fancy, "ice-free" bird bath are highly contested resources!). Like the house finches (even on cold snowy mornings like today) greeting the day with their chattering, group songs. But, the big observation of the week came just before the snow and cold hit...the rise of the earthworms!

Strong wind gusts are a year-round occurrence up on our Penn State New Kensington ridge top. Summer thunderstorms, spring and fall weather fronts, and winter blizzards can each generate high velocity winds that can do serious damage to our trees. This past week, a racing cold front colliding with our first warm, humid spring air mass (wasn't it nice?) triggered wind gusts that locally topped 90 miles per hour! It was a hurricane of a storm.

To quote George Harrison, "it's been a long, long lonely winter."

Two weeks ago I took a dozen cub scouts out on the Nature Trail to help them work on their Forestry merit badge. It was hard staying out for even an hour. I offered to help them with their first-aid/frostbite merit badge, too, but they weren't interested.  It was numbingly cold. This past weekend, there was a much welcomed break in the winter deep freeze, and Deborah, Kozmo, and I took advantage of the thaw to get out on the trail to try to find the first signs of spring.