My brother’s April 9 email announces, “Tree swallows are back. For you date people the earliest ever was 3/29/03 and latest 4/15 several times.”
He sent a similar Feb. 25 email announcing three red-winged blackbirds at his feeders.
I’ve been thinking about phenology lately, the timing of seasonal events in the natural world like bloom time, nesting eagles, ice-out on a local lake.
I confess I often apply phenology to human behavior like the first day warm enough to put winter’s long johns aside (always celebrated); changing storm windows to screens; the first vase of daffodils on the kitchen counter.
The last one qualifies as phenological data, a natural event impacted by weather (sunlight, rain, etc.) and climate. If I’d recorded the bloom time of the very odd daffodil in the gardens when we moved here four decades ago, I could add solid data to the study of phenological events.
Bloom time of one plant species is easier to note accurately than bears emerging from winter dens or bald eagles laying eggs.
Thoreau was an early phenologist, meticulously noting bloom times of plants in Concord, Massachusetts. As one example, today highbush blueberries flower three weeks earlier than noted by Thoreau, 160 years ago.
With growing concerns about atmospheric carbon higher than ever (hundreds of thousands of years), accompanied by global warming, phenology has gained a lot of attention including volunteers contributing data.
One long-term study tracks lilac leaf-out and bloom. As with Washington’s famed cherry blossoms, the trend is for earlier blooms. Peak cherry tree bloom in Washington, D.C. has moved up a week in the last 30 years along with lilacs.
At some level of awareness we know all this, perhaps reminded when we see sap buckets hanging from sugar maples earlier than we remember, or see robins in winter and wonder if it’s climate related. There’s a certain unease.
What’s somewhat new is hearing that the pace of change is the most rapid in thousands of years, and it’s causing weather extremes: droughts and floods; heat waves and cold waves.
Is that weather or is that climate?
Long-term phenological data separates weather from climate. Weather each season (a late spring or early spring) causes expected fluctuations in bloom time, for example. Data collected for decades following a consistent protocol separates climate change from weather fluctuations as the cause.
The vocabulary is shifting in an effort to better capture what’s going on. There always will be climate change and periods of global warming and cooling, but the recent rapid change is the problem. Not normal.
The old terms – “global warming” and “global climate change” – are being mothballed. I prefer “global climate disruption” because it reflects that something unnatural is happening.
What we do with that knowledge, our actions as individuals including what we put in the waste stream as consumers, as – commuters, as lawn and garden tenders, and, more importantly, what we do as voters this election year—that is the question.
The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has never been higher. A certain amount is natural, and necessary; but the industrial revolution began a steep climb that just won’t quit, and with it many recent “warmest year on record” reports.
As for this April 5 photo of a northern flicker, this handsome fellow showed up a few days before the snow, working our lawn for ants. Unlike other woodpeckers, it’s mostly a ground-forager.
I worried about him as snow covered his food source. I worried about woodcocks, too, and how they would find worms. Robins were moving around a lot, but they’re more versatile and can resort to old sumac berries and crabapple fruit.
Note the daffodils in the photo. Their stems went limp and have not recovered, but later-blooming daffodils will soon be in full bloom.
The snow melted in a day or two, along with my worries that particular time.
Climate disruption means disrupting food production. A late frost last spring nipped peach blossoms at just the wrong time. Insect pollinators were deprived of that nectar and pollen source. A lot of foods requires pollination.
Some insect pollinators are specialists. If drought browns out milkweed, for example, what will monarch butterfly caterpillars feed on in September – that super generation that flies all the way to winter in Mexico?
Those of us who notice nature’s timing, and who know the science of carbon levels in the atmosphere going back 80,000 years, aren’t successful in outreach beyond what Sam Evans-Brown, environmental reporter on NHPR, calls “the echo chamber”: people talking to like-minded people. A climate-change talk attracts an audience fully aware of the issues.
Core samples from the ice sheet measure atmospheric carbon and warming trends. They track a steep climb that began with the Industrial Revolution. But as the science of manmade climate change grows, denial has, too.
To reach beyond the echo chamber, we’re told not to mention science, not to be too “doom and gloom.” Tell stories. Cite grandchildren and the world we want to leave them. Be positive. There’s time for a turnaround.
Some days that’s possible. Other days exasperation wins, but I know the echo chamber is an unproductive, unenjoyable place to be. I also know that grandchildren who take care of the wild world can inspire, as can a walk with tree swallows circling overhead (due back soon), and the syncopated drumming of a yellow-bellied sapsucker, another odd woodpecker that arrived back two days ago.
Backyard Birder by Francie Von Mertens appears every other week in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.