March

Five times in the last week I told myself that I should keep some kind of phenology. This realization is an annual event, and it always happens a week or two before the first day of spring. It is when the change of seasons becomes obvious and I wonder whether spring is early or late this year. If I’d been keeping a record of such sightings year after year, I’d know how 2025 compares to 2024 or, for that matter, to any year since I moved to La Crosse three decades ago. I should keep a phenology, but I don’t. 

1) The first hint of spring is always Buzz, Dennis, and Gerard (three of my card-playing buddies) tapping their maple trees. To me, it still feels like winter, but the trees and my friends sense the change. This year has been hit or miss in terms of sap. Because the temperatures have been on a rollercoaster, the sap runs, then stops, then runs again. My friends are not sure about the quality or the quantity of this year’s syrup.

2) Next came the opening of the Mississippi River. The startling part of this year’s spring thaw was not that it came early or late, but that it came quickly. I walk Jack in Riverside Park as soon as the afternoon temperatures get into the 40s, and this year it seemed that the 40s and 50s were skipped over entirely. The weather jumped straight into the 60s, and the river went from frozen to completely open in a matter of days.

3, 4) Last Tuesday I was in Madison for the day. On the way home, I stopped for gas at the Kwik Trip outside of Sauk City. Adjacent the gas station is a water retention pond that has become a small permanent marsh. Already the male red-winged blackbirds were there to establish territory. Two days later I saw a pair of tundra swans in the La Crosse River Marsh. I do not know whether they are on their way to Saskatchewan or are among the handful of big birds that migrate no farther north than La Crosse.

5) In November I always bring my bicycle into the house and put it on a stanchion to make it stationary. I don’t bike inside more than a dozen times all winter, but it is there for days when the gymnasium on campus is closed. On March 14, I carried the bike outside, lubed the chain, put air in the tires, and went for my first real bicycle ride in nearly five months. After a winter of ellipticals, weight machines, and stationary bikes, putting in the miles along the river made exercise fun again. I took off my bike helmet for the last few blocks of my ride, and I felt like a wild man.

• A weather-related observation that is not necessarily seasonal: On Friday night I intentionally left my car in the driveway so the predicted rain would clean off some of the salt. On Saturday morning there was a thin layer of reddish mud over every inch of the vehicle. The news explained it as dust picked up by strong winds over Texas and Oklahoma and deposited as dirty rain over Wisconsin.