If you are anything like me, you spend much of April peering out through a frosty window watching the snows shrink back from the edges of your flowerbeds.
April is a month of transition. It begins with deep white snow and ends with soggy black soil. In the middle, there is a big dry brown spot with the tiniest tips of green just beginning to peek through the mulch and leaf litter.
In April, red-breasted male robins begin staking out backyards and fighting off potential challengers. A few weeks later, dusty-breasted females arrive and spring, as we understand it, begins seeping through the cracks of winter's stale crust.
Overhead, meanwhile, soaring white dots appear in our warming blue skies. Gulls are the true birds of spring in Calgary. Many hundreds of robins remain here all year round, but gulls vanish almost completely during winter months. Their return in April is our surest sign that summer is well on its way.
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But as springtime transitions go, my personal favourite is changing of the waxwings. Spring is the season during which we exchange massive, noisy, shifting clouds of cinnamon-breasted winter waxwings for small, lurking bands of curious yellow summer waxwings.
Bohemian Waxwings, our winter waxwings in Calgary, are chased south by the leading edge of winter as it creeps across our landscape. By late October, flocks of several hundred are common in the city and flocks of several thousand are not unknown.
Then, as the full weight of a Western Canadian winter settles down hard upon us, the enormous flocks of early winter break up and most move on. Seeking more fruit and milder weather than the foothills can offer in January or February, Bohemian Waxwings spread out in smaller flocks across North America. Only small flocks remain behind in Calgary.
But as winter retreats back to its Arctic fortress, our winter waxwings follow along behind. The once massive flocks reform and swirl across our skies in twisting, darting, surging masses before settling into backyards and gorging on fermented apples.
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Nothing breaks the monotony of watching the snow melt quite like the sight of a thousand drunken waxwings playing in your apple tree. Filled with nature's own hooch, they frolic and laugh and scamper about until some are so overindulged that they end up rolling around on their backs.
It is, in my eyes, a festival. It is a festival of winter waxwings, a joyous celebration of summer’s impending return. In a few weeks, winter will vanish from the foothills and they will return to the shadows of the northern Boreal forest to nest and raise their young.
Here in Calgary, the large crests and cinnamon breasts of Bohemian Waxwings will be replaced --in late May -- by the smaller crests and yellow breasts of Cedar Waxwings. And summer will be here at last.
© Brent Johner. Originally published in Calgary Gardening, April 2006. Reprint rights available. $9.95 CDN. Non-exclusive.
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