By Eric Cole
Is it just me or did Spring struggle to come in this year? By the back end of April, all we’d had were dribs and drabs of it—a frog calling from a cold ditch, a single swallow on the wire buffeted against the wind. My eyes still watered on Dumping Day as the wind careened through the hustle and bustle down on the wharf. Our daffodils almost flowered but again and again shut up shop at the last minute thanks to renewed cold.
If the poets Chaucer and Elliot’s assertion that “April is the cruelest month” rang true this year, then surely Robert Lowell’s phrase that “life begins to happen” can be attributed with certainty to May?
As sure as our hemisphere turns towards the sun, life emerges from every quarter like an irresistible force. But Climate Change is playing havoc with the stability of systems that developed over millennia in conjunction with more or less predictable weather patterns. Plants and animals are integral parts of these systems and so are at the mercy of these changes.
Anywhere can get hit with more extremes these days, but when we experience unusual cold spells, we tend to dismiss the idea of global warming, which suits a lot of powerful interests and world leaders attached at the hip to fossil fuels. The science is undeniable though. Overall, our planet is warming at an alarming and compounding rate because of our activities. And yes, our activities include sitting in our idling vehicles while our better halves nip into the supermarket.
Despite our abuses of poor Mother Earth, and there are many besides climate change, Nature will prevail, though not without casualties. Some species of plants and animals can adapt and even thrive in our wake. Others, not so much. Some have evolved into such specialized niches that they are vulnerable to a single change in conditions.
Spring is a great time to witness and assess all this because most species are more visible and expressive in spring than the rest of the year. You may never see a Spring peeper, but you sure can hear them, and healthy populations of amphibians are indicators of clean air and clean water. Canaries in the coalmines so to speak, as indeed are our resident birds and mammals.
Take this a step further and we can say that our neo-tropical migrant birds can tell us about not only the health of this their summer home, but also where they spend the winter, and all places in between. Some of these birds winter in South America, some in Central America, others in the southern US.
By mid-May, the cream of the crop is arriving in the flashing form of warblers. We get about twenty species of these avian gems in Nova Scotia; some breed, some keep going north. They go largely unseen, unless you look for them, as I do. Seeing them is a yearly privilege for me because the hazards they face on migration are so daunting. We’ve only added to them with our lights, our structures, our clear-cuts, and our cats. It’s no wonder many are declining in number. Blackburnian warblers for one are now a rare sight to behold in Nova Scotia thanks to the almost complete decimation of Old Forest they depend on here to breed.
One feisty migrant that seems to be doing ok is the Ruby-throated hummingbird. Lots of us put hummingbird feeders up to enjoy seeing these spectacular midgets. Remember it’s a quarter cup of granulated sugar in one cup of water, no food dyes, no honey, and change it out every 3 or 4 days, after cleaning the feeder with warm water and dish soap.
