Thursday, February 13, 2020

Those crazy birds

When I was a child, we had a colorful book of poems which contained this rhyme:
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor robin do then?
Poor thing.

He'll sit in a barn,
And keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing,
Poor thing.
I still have that book, and I read the same poem to our girls when they were young. It's just one of those things that always stuck with me.

Well last Sunday, February 2 -- let me repeat that, February 2 -- I was sitting near a window when I heard a crazy noise: robins. I looked up in the leafless tree outside the window, and sure enough:


Those crazy birds. It was February 2.

Not unexpectedly, weather rolled in shortly after I saw the robins. We had wind, we had rain, we had snow, we had sub-freezing temperatures. What were those robins thinking, coming back to North Idaho on February 2?


Sure enough, I didn't see them again.

But this morning -- February 13 -- I heard another noise. Looking out the window at the same tree, I saw a red-winged blackbird singing his heart out.


Holy cow, you little avian wonders -- it's the middle of February! What are you thinking!

........Unless they know something we don't know............

6 comments:

  1. In both of those pictures I can see what appear to be buds on the tree - how warm was it when you saw those birds?
    Where I live, we have had mild winters where buds started and then late cold killed the buds and the trees produced few leaves or fruit that year (some trees seem to die from it).

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    1. I was wondering the same thing.

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  2. Yeah, the robins have come out of the woods here, but they may go back!

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  3. We've had lots of robins in southern Idaho. The flickers had eaten lots of the crab apples and the robins are cleaning out the rest of them.

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  4. It's called CLIMATE CHANGE.

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    1. Gosh when I was a kid we called it the 4 seasons, that would signify the change in climate. Some seasons were average sometimes there would be unusual. It was also called life. Animals will usually know way before their human counterparts. It is up to humans to watch the behavior of those animals, like Patrice is doing. I saw some robins also and thought the same thing. Why are you so early? What do you know that I don't?
      Rita Miller

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