This is Illinois Extension’s Voice of the Wild. In this episode we’ll be thinking about the first tentative signs of spring. We’ll be wondering when spring can be said to start and what creatures might lead us to that conclusion. And It starts…with that old myth.
There’s an old belief that the appearance of the robin is one of the true signs of spring’s return. But their promise is a false one because the Robin never leaves. They are partially migratory, so some will go but many stay. Their habits do change in the cold, with the ground frozen they take to the trees in flocks. Together they cruise suburbs and woodlands…fly to neighboring cities and back again; all in a search for berries and fruits still clinging to leaf-bare branches. So When you're inside, huddled and hiding from the cold, they’re out there - all winter.
So to whom might we turn if not the robin? What might reach us from the season ahead the way that goldenrod warns of autumn like a lighthouse in the dark? Well, spring does not have the luxuries that summer affords the fall; it does not have long those summer days to build the plant that might host those brilliant blooms. Spring can’t afford that kind of flamboyance, at least not at first, not with the sun low and the water locked away in ice and snow.
So even though fall can be seen coming as goldenrod buds and maturing bluestem as far ahead as July, very few signs of spring manage to break through the hard frost of early January. There’s only one that i’ve come to trust; the rebuilding of the day.
The change in light, day to day, is slowest at a solstice - so those endless summer evenings that stay so long we can take them for granted? They have a counterpart…a long run of winter nights that linger. In the days just past that shortest of days, the winter solstice, the extra light comes only in scant handfuls of seconds, but by the second week of January the daylight builds by a minute or so a day. Just enough to notice the sky is a little brighter on your way home from work. If you can hold on that glimmer of hope, I promise it is a slippery slope from there, because even before the end of January - spring is well on its way.
There are already plants stirring beneath the ice. In fact, one is melting its way through; Skunk cabbage. Their musty blooms attract flies who have been fooled once by a fickle midwest winter and then fooled again by a plant that smells of carrion. Skunk cabbage is one of the rare plants that burn carbohydrates to make heat, so If a late-winter tempest does bring a driftless wet snow (the kind that might destroy a more delicate sprout) you’ll find Skunk cabbage peaking through.
By February the light comes in twos and threes - Frogs stir in their ponds, perhaps not yet calling but awake and alive. That light also brings flocks of Red-winged blackbirds and Grackles. A scattering will have stayed through the winter, but the big boisterous crowds of them will have left and it's now that they come back to grind out raucous calls from twisted stems and old cattails.
Those who might be skeptical of such an early bird might point to the snowdrop - but be careful; Snowdrops and that other early bloomer (Winter aconite) are tourists here; not native. They adapted for a spring a long way from here; so look instead to our native ephemerals. Especially that first wonder; the Virginia springbeauty. A few will get their start in the early days of February; they’ll rise only a few hesitant inches above the leaf litter and do so with blooms no bigger than a dime; but for the winter-weary…finding that first flower hiding in the woodland duff is enough to make you dance and cheer, and kneel down in the mud to admire.
In more open land, that denizen of the country road returns. The humble killdeer; A rare sight in the depths of winter, but as February melts they return with stiff wingbeats to chatter nervously and belt out calls over empty fields and quiet roadsides.
The days at the end of February are a full two hours brighter than when the year had just begun and the rest of the early native ephemerals begin taking hold; harbinger of spring, cutleaf toothwort, and many others to follow. With the extra glances of warmth; the robins come back down from the trees to search for earthworms and insects. The salamanders go about their muddy business on the thawing forest floor. Deer shed their antlers; this year’s burden of competing for a mate now over.
The Eastern phoebe returns; its search only just beginning. It finds a perch and stays loyal to it for a time; casting out for insects among the swelling spicebush and maple flower buds…and coming back again. Casting out and coming back. And again. And again. The Golden-crowned kinglets, which you may have found one or two all winter, are now flitting about the high branches in little flocks all heading north. All winter the woods have been quiet, with singers few and far between and all of them too busy surviving to pause and give you a good look; this is easy birding for a change.
Around the first of March… the “peent” of a Woodcock in an open field at sunset - their whistling flight circles about the end of winter’s trials. And if not the end….it can’t be long now. The spring peepers and chorus frogs announce themselves nightly. The buds of spicebush burst open into yellow sprites. The first cautious purple-tinged leaves of virginia bluebells push their way through thoroughly thawed soil. The canopy begins to swell; and each morning is greener than the one before.
By April, when Eastern redbud adorns itself in purple and the migratory warblers (the yellow-rumps and others) are all flitting about the greening canopy; you’ll be left wondering when it all began…surely not with the skunk cabbage….but it was certainly before the bluebells. …could it have been with that first spring beauty? Or was it the calling frogs?
And while you wonder; your community will come alive with the warmth of a spring that started many weeks ago. As they emerge, lawns greening and tree leaves unfurling, they notice the robin.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be releasing episodes featuring spring’s earliest and most interesting singers. If you’d like to hear more immediately you can check the description of the episode, there you’ll find a podcast about early spring from my friends over at Everyday Environment. Give them a follow too, if you haven’t already. Most of the sounds I used today came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell lab. This episode was written and narrated by myself, Brodie Dunn. Voice of the Wild is a service of Illinois Extension’s Natural Resources, Environment, and Energy program. And Thank you for listening.