It hit nine below zero this morning in the woods of east Anchorage, but the birds didn’t mind.
NASA’s Blue Marble
A raven winged over the park outside my backyard with a melodic koo-ack. The local chickadee flock fluttered from bare tree to bare tree, chattering, darting, ever in motion. One lone male pulled out from the group to perch atop a birch. Over and over, he called three descending notes. I-am-here, this-my-tree, I-will-fight, I-am-here.
It’s March 20 in southern Alaska, 61 degrees north latitude, a time when hard winter totters on the brink of spring melt and the explosion of growth that will transform the forest into green summer jungle. Any day now, they say, the cold will break and temperature will climb. Mucky puddles will inundate the black ice. The snow will rot and collapse. The willows will bud. Robins and geese will come back.
Vernal Equinox arrived in Anchorage only this minute, 3:07 p.m. local daylight time, marking the twice-yearly moment when Sun shifts its glare from one hemisphere to the other. In Anchorage, it was 25 degrees, cloudy, slight wind in the bare trees.