As Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and California receive several feet of snow this week, I have seen my first native bee of the year a few minutes ago in New Mexico. Thus, let’s kickoff spring!
Southern Hemispher-ites are welcome to post autumn-themed sightings.
I saw my first barn swallows for the year on Sunday.
I discovered an unusually early Eastern Phoebe nest on the outside of my apartment building in northern Georgia, USA. All four chicks successfully fledged.
Hey, it’s going to be in the 50s in Denver tomorrow. We’re getting our Spring weather a couple of days at a time!
We’ve been having unusually warm weather alternated with cold in Virginia. The woodcocks are back, and the robins are singing regularly in the mornings now. Some goldfinches are starting to change into their breeding plumage, and the first spring flowers are blooming.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148894603
It’s unseasonably warm and spring seems early in the NC mountains, too. Our daffodils have started blooming a couple of days ago, and the red-winged blackbirds have arrived and joined the flock at my bird feeder. It’s still February - usually this doesn’t happen until March.
Yesterday, some creosote flower buds and plenty of Juniper pollen cones https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/149696259
Lots of recent flowers in SW New Mexico https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=andrewtree&verifiable=any @andrewtree
The Cardinals just began singing last week.
This harbinger of spring in the Mojave Desert just got buried by about 8 inches of snow. The North American high deserts will be lagging a bit this year…
In the northeast this was a “winter without snow” in the coastal parts of New England. At least until tonight I guess. It has been so mild this winter but I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary. Moths are the typical winter noctuids and spring geometers. The pussy willows are fuzzy now though.
I’ve seen East Coast ski conditions this winter and that’s no fun!
Winter without snow in most of central and southern NM. It rained at my house in December, January, and February and I didn’t have to shovel snow a single time, which is a first since I moved here. Snowpack is near average in northern NM and only 47% of the state is in moderate drought or worse compared to 97% a year ago, when we had two spring wildfires exceed 325,000 acres.
Went out this morning to find my car covered in pollen. Spring is in full swing.
First sign of spring in Alaska is that it’s light out after work (Mostly kidding). I did hear a Black-capped Chickadee singing its springtime song the other day.
On my way home from the library today, I passed a parking lot median which was nearly covered with little mounds of soil, and tiny sand wasps were buzzing all over.
Silly to discuss spring for entire northern hemisphere: I cancelled our first master gardening session in SE Massachusetts today because the ground is frozen; whoever was touting spring in the northeast wasn’t talking about New England, where we had snow last weekend, expected again Saturday, some 50-degree weather in between with nights in the 20s. And they warn us that this year, even though the plants may finally decide that it’s spring and germinate or start their new growth, to be ready for some polar surprises.
Not to mention some azaleas bloomed last fall, and some daffodials were appearing in January… here the year 1816, the year without a summer, is taken seriously, when the seasons seemed to go backwards, instigated by a volcanic eruption the year before. Someday perhaps the vicissitudes of climate change will be clearer. For now, I’m less worried that my wintersown seeds won’t receive proper prolonged stratification conditions, so much as they will finally germinate then get blasted by a freeze.
I saw two butterflies today, including the state butterfly of New Mexico. It’s about two weeks early! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/150325287
…and suddenly, it seems there are flowers everywhere.
