We blinked and spring arrived

A lonely osprey flew over Annapolis Thursday afternoon.

Temperatures had struggled up to 50 by then, a letdown after a much warmer Wednesday. Sunlight falling from the pale blue sky felt a bit wan, filtered by a flotilla of white and gray clouds decidedly more winter than spring.

But spring it is. That’s because, for Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay, it’s not meteorological spring that matters, or the vernal equinox that marks the change of seasons. It is the return of the osprey. Look around you, there are other signs. Narcissuses and crocuses are pushing their green buds up, pregnant with yellow and purple flowers almost ready to pop. Boatyards are unlimbering pleasure craft for the season ahead. Lacrosse is afoot on high school fields at almost every school.

They all fall behind the osprey. Pandion haliaetus is a truer harbinger of warmer weather, sunnier skies and metamorphosis than its earthbound rivals.

Osprey make their way here to mate, migrating in the spring from Central and South America along rivers of air that comprise the great Eastern, interior, and Western flyways. They arrive in early March, just when everyone starts to think how nice it feels not to be bundled up or inside so much. They get here just as we suffer that first, unexpected sunburn under a clear sky unfiltered by trees filled with leaves.

And they elicit the oh-so-human response, that nothing is real until it is seen and documented. Look up, it’s an osprey. Look down, the osprey cam is live again and our favorite birds are rebuilding their nest. Look there and see a marvel of circling hovering flight. Look here and see the beauty of a fallen, brown and white striped feather.

Boaters and power companies know to take warning from that first sighting overhead.

BGE wants you to look out for birds atop utility poles as part of its osprey watch program, emailing the pole number beneath a nest or maybe a nearby address to ospreywatch@bge.com. The goal is to keep the birds safe and the power on.

Boaters know a growing osprey nest — a construction of sticks and twine and grasses and any kind of stuff — can be removed from a dock or a boat before the eggs arrive, but never after until the birds are gone.

The earliest osprey are males, searching out a nest they left behind last fall to begin twig-by-branch repairs. Females arrive a bit later and join the work, starting a seasonal courtship that will fill mornings ahead with sharp yewk-yewk... yewk-yewk.

Rachael Carson saved the osprey. Without her, we would be reduced to calendars and flower buds.

“Silent Spring,” Carson’s foundational stone of environmentalism, was published in 1962 and documented the devastating impact of the insecticide DDT on eggshells of waterside birds like the osprey. Long banned today, populations have slowly grown back to give us the sight of a spring arrival on Thursday.

Ospreys are anglers in both meanings of the word. They swoop and plunge obliquely into the rivers and streams to catch fish that grow no more than 12 inches. Fishhawk, seahawk, riverhawk, they are known around the world — la águila pescadora, chim ung bien, gorgor or kalasääski in Spanish, Vietnamese, Sudanese or Finnish.

In some places, they are not welcome. Competiton for fish, bad luck or just another bird.

In Annapolis, though, they mean something. Soon the socks will come off in Eastport, March storms will remind us that winter lets go only reluctantly.

So, the osprey has come home. Happy spring.