Feb 28 2022 - The Robins are Singing to the Tulips Breathing
Have the Robins starting singing this early or am I just listening for them earlier this year? It says that Robins migrate in late February and arrive in Canada in early March.
This year we had many Robins remain in the winter - if there is an abundance of crab apple trees, they will remain.
We do know that American Robins are migrating earlier - an article in sciencedaily.com says it is 5 days earlier per decade, so in the course of the study ongoing- since 1994 - they are here 12 days earlier. (The article was written in 2020).
If my anecdotal evidence can be counted, we have more Robins than ever before. My assumption is that they are the hardiest of the songbirds in their ability to adapt to human habitats. Articles say that climate change is likely a large factor as winters are becoming milder, and more birds are able to stay in place without expending energy on a long migration south. There is more on migrating robins HERE.
I consider the singing of Robins to be the beginning of Spring, and with a little bit of earth and grass showing today, I am prepared to celebrate Spring's meteorological arrival tomorrow despite the snow flurries forecast.
I think I will invite all my past ancestors and present relatives to join me in this celebration. How many are there? I just found out that answer from sciencedaily.com. In an article this month in Science a study has been published outlining a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us - a human family tree with 27 million ancestors.
One of the researchers, Dr Wong, said: "This study is laying the groundwork for the next generation of DNA sequencing. As the quality of genome sequences from modern and ancient DNA samples improves, the trees will become even more accurate and we will eventually be able to generate a single, unified map that explains the descent of all the human genetic variation we see today. That article is HERE. The scientists who did this work are at the Big Data Institute and they integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases. It included a total of 3,609 genome sequences from 215 populations. They also estimated where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The key events in human evolutionary history includes the migration out of Africa.
I got inspired by oxymorons last week and wrote this simple poem to Spring. Afterwards, I found a poem by Sylvia Plath with the opposite reaction to tulips. Here's an excerpt:
"The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe"
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