Signs of Spring: animal, vegetable, and mineral

[redbird]

It's starting to look and sound like spring around here, and even smell a bit like spring.

The birds came first: I've seen and heard robins and grackles in the last couple of days, and cattitude saw a red-winged blackbird in the park last weekend, while I was in Massachusetts. Also, squirrels and woodpeckers seem to be gathering nesting material.

Cattitude saw crocuses while I was away, but when I looked on Monday evening, all I saw was proof that the squirrels had also found the crocuses, but apparently found them less tasty than usual, or been chased off before they had time to finish their lunch. A flower lying, gnawed off, on the ground, no longer really open, doesn't quite seem to count. (I'd already seen snowdrops, but those are winter flowers, albeit late winter.) This evening, on my way home, I found that one of the dark purple crocuses we've been watching in bud for the last little while was open. (A few others near it will open soon, I think.) I also saw a tree in Arlington with plump red flower buds on a few branches, but that's interesting more than significant, the way the seasons feel to me.

This evening, as I left the subway station and walked up the hill (before I saw the crocus), I heard an ice cream truck. I didn't see it, but for a couple of blocks I was followed by the usual recorded music. I'll be tired of it soon enough, and don't much like soft ice cream, but the first ice cream truck is evidence that other humans, as well as birds and rodents, think spring is starting. It was also warm enough that I smelled a faint smell of live soil in the park (instead of nothing, or a whiff of skunk).

[The chewed-off flowers were in the patch shown in this userpic.]

Comments

[pameladean]

Oh, thank you for this. We are some weeks away from similar phenomena, I think.

P.