Wake up! Wake up!

3/5/06 –3/11/06

By C. Zaitz

That is the message I’ve been getting from Mr. Cardinal, the feisty red Lord of the Treetops who has been early-morning serenading any female within earshot for the past week or two. I wonder if he knows that even though I don’t have a crest on my head, I’m still very impressed with him and would like to get to know him better! I remember the first time I heard the song of the boy Cardinal and wondered who was making that pretty sound. It took me a while but I finally found out one day when I saw his crimson flash of feathers as he whistled down at me.

Mr. Cardinal’s spring song is music to my ears. I love the sounds of nature waking up. I’ve noticed that the sun is waking up earlier too! The change in the sun is very apparent this time of year. Not only is it rising earlier every day, but sunrise is creeping northward at a steady clip this month. That may sound funny; how can the sunrise move? But it does- you can see it every morning if you look out the window around 6am as the coffee is brewing. Right now the sun sets a bit south of east, but by the 20th it will rise due east and that day marks the first day of spring. Every day after that, the sun will rise more northward of east and the length of daylight will grow. At the other end of day, the sunset will also creep northward. This inevitable, steady “march” of the sun along the horizon is echoed in nature’s anticipated spring march towards new life and growth, though sometimes it seems more like a sprint than a march!

Speaking of sprinting, I nearly had to run the other morning to get outside before the sun blasted away the last signs of planets and starlight. I saw the bright orange glow of the sunrise and knew that I would still be able to see Venus burning clearly in the Eastern sky, but I wasn’t so sure about Jupiter. Luckily he was there as well, hanging midway up the sky in the south. My mad rush was caused by the fact that sunrise gets about 2-3 minutes earlier a day. That may not sound like a lot, but in the beginning of March sunrise was at 7:08 am and by the end of the month it will be at 6:17am. That’s nearly an hour earlier! This is one of the reasons why we really notice the change of season this month more than others. The changes in the sky, the changes in our surroundings, the greening of nature and songs of the birds all serve to remind us that spring is in the air. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be wary of Michigan’s curve snow-balls she always throws at us, but even the Great Lakes’ cold fingers of winter can’t postpone the onset of spring!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view!