Early bird catching worm sooner than most years
les and temperature records that are fed into a computer model.
The spring leaf index goes back to 1900, and 2012 has been the earliest. But preliminary records show this year ahead of 2012 in a good chunk of the nation. It’s still too early to draw a conclusion, said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee scientist Mark D. Schwartz and phenology network director Jake Weltzin.
As the world warms, spring is arriving earlier but not everywhere. For a broad swath of the U.S., 2017 sticks out like a crocus in early February. Nashville, St. Louis, Washington, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Indianapolis are at least three weeks early on the spring index, but Phoenix and Los Angeles are running a bit late. “It’s weird,” Weltzin said Tuesday. The latest early spring isn’t supposed to show up for decades based on computer simulations that model springs of the future, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private Weather Underground.
Fox butterflies are already out in Massachusetts and New York. Beetles are scurrying around Martha’s Vineyard. Crocuses and snowdrops are in full flower in suburban Boston — all exceptionally early because of warm temperatures and little snow cover, said Boston University biology professor Richard Primack.
“I am already hearing woodpeckers knocking on tree trunks” when these sounds usually occur in March or April, said Primackn.
The northern shoveler duck is usually the next to last duck to make it to upstate New York, arriving sometime in April, but it’s already here, said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
These wildlife sightings stem from warm weather in February that Masters called “off-the-charts weird” that included upper 90s in Oklahoma and a first-of-its-kind February tornado in Massachusetts.