Spring Rituals

I am personally not an advocate of mild winters because I know what they portend for the summer – which naturally makes me an outcast from polite conversation. This is a remembrance of what we have come to expect from winter and the return of spring. I thought I’d resurrect it to take the chill off a bit.  

The spring equinox snuck up on us this year.  Because of the mild winter there wasn’t the usual gratuity of balmy moist air that teases us for a week sometime in March before the last cold snap reminds us that winter can hang on until the end of April in central Pennsylvania.  Winter was too un-winterlike for most people to appreciate the transition into spring.  Judging from the conversations about the weather that I’ve been having, most people I know are taking on the airs of Californians.  Consistently mild temperatures with a minimum of precipitation is now considered normal.  In fact, any forecast predicting temperatures below 40 degrees on a February day is often met with derisive comments about how totally inept weathermen are – as if meteorology was really a science that controls weather rather than a form of legalized gambling.

This haughty attitude insisting that the elements should rightfully conform to our daily whims seems to be more ingrained than ever.  The other day I was nearly kicked out of the local hardware store when I commented that the winter had been too mild and that I would have preferred much colder temperatures and about three feet of snow.  Up until that point no one was really paying attention to me, but judging from the looks I got you would have thought I said something really nasty about someone’s mother.  From now on I’ll stick to politics and religion when I go to buy my building supplies.  The least hint of damp or cold in public conversation is now strictly taboo.

If this warming trend continues we’ll have a whole generation growing up thinking that winter is just one big holiday shopping spree.  But perhaps I’m being too cynical.  There are still the visual cues of spring that tell us that there’s something really special about the middle of March.  At least there are still the patches of color that seem to miraculously appear overnight in gardens and along roadsides.  The crocus and coltsfoot reassure some deep subliminal need that we have officially crossed into a new season.  We are fooled for a while that some greater power has given us a fresh start and we can spend the next nine months making the same old mistakes.

The return of our favorite birds is usually the most potent sign of our annual salvation from winter.  The common harbinger for most people is the robin.  For others it’s the red winged black bird.  For those who haven’t bothered to look out their window all winter, the blue bird represents the return of spring, even though these hardy birds are most obvious against a snowy background.  Then there are the morose among us who welcome the turkey vulture back to their peculiar niche of roadside rodent maintenance.  But for us it’s the starling that abruptly marks the passage from one season to the next.

This unimpressive bird, though loved by Shakespeare, has very little to commend itself in the way of poetic spring beauty. It’s a dumpy little creature with no particular song except for what it copies from the mockingbird.  It is a robber of nobler birds’ nests and when it finds a crevice in your roof will make a shitty mess throughout.  Still, we wake every year on a certain day in March to the rustling, scratching and general mayhem caused by these vile little creatures.  Although their initial appearance usually coincides with the rising of a brilliant spring sun through our bedroom window all other associations with these birds are purely of a hateful nature.  Every year I try to remind myself that every creature, no matter how despised, deserves a nesting place.  But after ten minutes of incessant clatter my naturalist tendencies dissipate like a light frost.  I really hate these birds and they have no place reconstructing my roof just to satisfy some vernal mating instinct.

You would think that a bird this size really couldn’t make much of a ruckus.  But once they wedge themselves through the crack in the rotting eaves they take on titanic proportions.  There must be some sort of synergistic reaction from the insulation that temporarily transforms them to monstrous size – sort of like the Incredible Hulk with feathers.  At first there is only the usual rustling you’d expect from a bird.  This escalates to what I think is furniture rearranging, which leads abruptly to the clatter of a general contractor on a good day.  There is, of course, a brief reprieve after the consummation of the weird mating ritual that demands such blatant amplification.  But after a few weeks the tap dancing lessons begin.  Most people aren’t aware that before a fledgling learns to fly they are required to take some sort of dance lesson.  Apparently, our family of starlings is really into Fred Astair.

Up until now I’ve been willing to live with these unwanted guests because I know their stay is temporary.  (They’ll spend most of their summer hanging out on wires with the cow birds down the road.  So much for family values.)  But the other day as I was replacing the shingles on the kitchen roof I noticed bits of yellow insulation drifting onto the lawn.  At first I mistook these patches of color for daffodils.  Then I realized these snowy wisps were being torn out of the main roof by the starlings.  They must be moving in more furniture for the in-laws, I thought.  This was all the impetus I needed to blow our credit limit on a new roof.  These bastards have got to go.

So next year, even if the weather retains its Mediterranean character, I will know when it’s spring by the sound of the frustrated thump of a starling cranium against a new soffit.  They’ll have to take up residence in the dog house, which will be quite a sight since the chickens already have dibs on the dog food bowl.