Time to "Spring Forward"

No, it is not time to put our clocks ahead an hour, but mentally, this Yankee living in Texas had better set her clock ahead by two months. Clearly, Feb is the beginning of spring in Hill Country. In my yard I have two little sticks of forsythia that have bloomed at the beginning of Lent rather than at Easter. Plus I have been treated to some lively chase scenes between the Carolina chickadees, which usually signals the territorialism of the breeding season has begun. Even the Bluebonnets, that the area is famous for, have come up enough that now I know where not to mow. February but is sure feels like April. Probably the best thing to do is to just toss out the calendar and take each day as it comes. Today, Feb 23 its 80, summer in my Cape Cod mind, but tomorrow it will be a high of 60, clearly fall! So lets just forget any idea of four seasons for the next few years.

I know I have mentioned this before, but the Chickadees here, although they look almost the same as my Black Capped chickadees from home, are Carolina chickadees.
And the telltale difference is in their sound. The Black Capped Chickadee gives a two call note when claiming a bit of the woods for his own, “fee-bee”, whereas the Carolina goes for a lengthy oratorio of 4 notes, “fee-bee, fee bay”. Not a huge difference, but enough to make you look twice and realize you may not know what you are looking at. However, both species, when excited or agitated about another pair coming too close get the same excited hysteria in their call and often the chase begins, one pair routing out the other interlopers.

Reading about Carolina chickadees I read that they probably parted from the Black Capped some 250,000 yrs ago. They, like the Black capped, love insects when they can get them, but switch to seed eating at your feeder and elsewhere in the winter. On the Cape mine came to the feeder pretty much year round except when they were nesting and raising the young, then if you are going to be catching insects for the kinder, why not have a few yourself? Happily for the gardener they eat aphids as part of their diet so welcome them in.

The Carolina chickadee caches its food, which can make you feel less guilty about those days you don’t fill the feeder as early as you should. An article said they tended to do this at mid-day and then eat it later in the day, or in the next few days. I vaguely remember an article that was mostly dealing with the elasticity of brains that pointed out that the chickadees brain grows by ¼ the size when it is caching food. Maybe we should put down the crossword puzzles and start squirreling food around your house and see if our acumen improves!

Other signs of it really being emotionally April rather than Feb is the return of Purple Martins to a gourd complex they have at a Nature center I am volunteering at. We had a group of third graders the other day and just the way it often seemed at Greenbriar, the students arrive and it’s time to, “Cue the nature”. With this group of third graders we had just started talking about migrants when in swooped two early arriving Martins, checked out the houses as if on cue and then took off again. But to go into Purple Martins now would task your attention span so, shall we save it for another day? I think we shall. Who knows perhaps by then it will be a different “season” too.