The month of March is often a study in contrasts. We experience days of warmth and promise, days that have us thinking about short sleeved shirts, followed by icy blasts of winter that send us back to the closet looking again for the parka. In like a lion and out like a lamb might cover the month some place well south of here. Ours may be more aptly summed as, in like a lion and a lamb followed by a meal of mutton and a nice wool sweater. Whatever the case March almost always produces two contrasting events, both suggest that winter is indeed in retreat. Spring is here! A robin in my front yard! CC-licensed photo by blmiers2 A robin in spring. CC-licensed photo by blmiers2 March nearly always heralds the return of the robins. And March 26th is the average day of this auspicious event. In 30 years of observing their migration there have been only six years when they didn’t make it back in March. In five of those six years our tardy travelers were here in the first week of April. Last year the first robins didn’t make it back to Grand Rapids until the twentieth of the month. Though the average is the 26th the range runs from March 6th through the 20th of April. This is a remarkable span of time and serves to reinforce the notion that robins migrate based on temperature.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:48:20 +0000
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