I enjoyed our false spring. And then late in the month I stepped out of my garage and came face-to-face with spring itself. Sitting in my neighbor's crab apple tree was Turdus migratorius Linnaeus, a great big fat red breasted robin...in January... in central Indiana.
If you don't live where there is spring it is impossible to describe how joyous the arrival of the first robin makes you feel. They're like dear old friends returning home. And their arrival means green trees and green grass can't be far behind. Their bold patrols across your lawn invites you to return outside after a winter's sleep. They're morning song that begins long before dawn, means dawn is coming, never doubt it. But this particular robin redbreast, along with thirty or forty of his fellows, was two months early. And the abrupt return of winter the very next week must have come as an unpleasant shock for them all.
Turdus is latin for thrush, and the North American red breasted migratory thrush eats only worms and grubs and insects of all kinds. Our false spring may have fooled the thrushes but it had failed to deceive the worms or the Japanese beetle grubs who remained sleeping beneath my lawn. I feared that my feathered friends would find no larvae manna to sustain them. The life of a Robin is difficult even in normal times. These days of global warming, it must be doubly so.
Robins are not supposed to arrive before spring; but they do, some of them, every year. Like most species, they don't always fit neatly into the clean and precise text book charting of their behavior patterns. I guess no one bothered to explain the rules of robin migration to the robins themselves. Only humans think in terms of rules, of correct and incorrect, of predator and scavenger, just and injustice, divine and sinful. Mother Nature can rarely afford to tolerate such absolutes. In each generation of robins there are Robin Goodfellows, avian Pucks who are the early birds. In good years they get the worm and the best nesting sites. In bad years they rarely survive. They can also be the late birds who tarry on their way north, so that should winter refuse to release her choke hold until April or May, the feathered slothful may inherit the earth.
Even in a species as driven by genetics as these bold worm eaters there are odd ball individuals who break the rules, who come early and stay late. They are the members of a pigeon flock you see stretched out along a telephone line, but sitting off by themselves; more vulnerable to hawks but a sort of gene insurance against some more unlikely disaster that would sacrifice the flock itself. They are the bears who awake during hibernation and go prowling for a February snack. And times such as these seem to favor the oddballs - dare I call them the adventurous?
Healthy North American Grizzly Bears have denned for at least the past three years on Melville Island, 100 miles out in the western Artic Ocean and 700 miles north of their "usual" range. To suggest that this is merely the product of global warming would be to credit the Medieval Climate Optimum, which lasted from 900 to 1600AD, with Marco Polo's journey to Cathy. Clearly his voyages would not have been as easy during the Little Ice Age that followed, but for the human we assume the primary motivation is curiosity, a hunger for adventure and wanderlust. Are these not influenced by our genes? Could there not be a Grizzly Marco Polo on Melville Island? Could my January robin not have been a bold traveler bent on excitement and the early worm?
The vast majority of robins die in their first year, killed by humans in one way or another. They fall prey to our house cats who are allowed to run wild, or they fly into our windows or glass patio doors. Some are shot by young human males armed with BB guns, and many choke on worms feeding beneath a lawn sprayed with poison. And this is what we do to a bird we profess affection for. Some are taken by hawks, but a simple rule would be; if you want to see more hawks keep your cat inside, put decals on your windows, teach your children not to shoot at birds, and learn to co-exist with the Japanese beetle.
The few survivors of human contact live five or six years, on average. This means they experience five or six autumns, five or six migration flights, five or six winters along the Gulf, five or six spring returnings to the north. They are important to the species, these average survivors. Their behavior learned through luck and perseverance teaches the next generation by example. They are the guardians of robin culture, such as it is.
But the adventuresome thrushes are the future of the species. They are the first to feel the cold teeth of climate change, the cold blooded shift in habitat and advantage. And they are the first to taste extinction or to stumble upon adjustment. And that is why they are early, as they were this year. They are the robins I am most attracted to, in part because my own life has not been average, but a gamble that the unlikely will happen, and the unusual will become the new normal. Which kind of Robin are you?
There is as much a danger in denying other species a touch of our humanity, as there is in believing they are simply humans on four legs, with feathers or fins. We are, each of us, each species in itself, worthy of respect because we are, each species of us, experiments in variations and averages. And that is what we share.
And that is the manner by which global warming will test us; human no more and no less than the first robin of a false spring. In such a time of change, it is our abnormalities that will prove our strength.
