The redwing blackbirds are back. They are the first sign that spring is here. A friend in town said they have been back at his place for a while. They are always later here.
They are unmistakable, more heard than seen, trilling in the willows along the river. One day on the dogs’ usual walk, the only sounds were the river itself and the crunching of the ice on the puddles in the lane. The next day, same walk, the blackbirds are loudly announcing they are back and spring is on.
There’s something satisfying about walking down the lane and breaking the ice on top of the puddles. It brings out the 3-year-old in me, cracking the ice on top of the tire ruts in the dirt road. I have an expensive pair of muck boots I bought in large part so I could walk down the lane stomping the ice on the puddles. Doing that with the redwing blackbirds trilling in the willows — well, it doesn’t get a lot better than that.
This was a strange winter, though I guess they all are now. Last year was constant snow, sort of crushing snow, with frequent roof shovelings and endless plowing.
Plowing the place open was as routine as eating breakfast, and by this point in the year, I had run out of places to put the snow and the roads were barely wide enough to navigate. And it just kept coming. skiing was amazing, but it felt like I was only one broken hydraulic hose away from cannibalism at my house on the frontier.
This winter, the snow line moved up a few hundred feet in elevation. It was the warmest February in history. The higher terrain has more snow than normal, whatever passes for normal these days. Alta, for example, has a deeper base this year than last. After a slow start in November and December, it’s deep up high. But not so much around town or at my house.
Plowing has been tricky because the snow was often very wet and heavy. The ground didn’t stay frozen so the mud was always a factor. I’ve only had to shovel roofs on the outbuildings once, and the overall depth at the house has been on the thin side all year.
It’s not over. There will be more snow. You can’t trust April around here. Some of the biggest storms of the year sneak up on us in April, 60 degrees one day and a foot of snow the next.
Winter isn’t finished, but it’s over. The blackbirds are back.
Speaking of birds, the American Ornithological Society is eliminating bird names deemed “offensive and exclusionary” by their official committee of deemers, beginning with birds named after people.
It turns out that some of the early birders who spent their lives differentiating 240 different species of finches, for example, were slave owners, believers in eugenics, late on their child support, or otherwise people who, by today’s high moral standards, don’t deserve to have a bird named after them.
So the Cooper’s hawk will get a new name because Cooper was a flawed person. Just what his flaws were isn’t stated and I haven’t been able to find out what dark secrets require renaming the hawk.
The renaming has caused a painful rift among the birding community, with some actively objecting to the re-naming. The Ornithological Society is determined to stick with the renaming, saying that if you are going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs, or something like that.
Well, you can’t leave a controversy of that gravitas untouched. Having solved all of the other problems facing the state, the Utah Legislature went all in on to bird names. They adopted a state law prohibiting the Utah Division of Wildlife resources from changing the names of birds.
Rep. Casey Snider, from Cache County (who you may remember as Dakota-Pacific’s toady in the Legislature last year when they tried an end run around local zoning) sponsored the legislation. Here in the great state of Utah, we are not about to muck around with the names of our birds.
The bill preventing the Utah DWR from adopting the newly assigned names passed the House 69-2, and the Senate 25-0. The bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.
To get a better understanding of this urgent situation, I went right to the source. I sat on a big rock by the river and asked the redwing blackbirds if it bothered them to be identified by the color of their feathers rather than the content of their character. They answered, “trill.”
A group of finches were gathered at a neighbor’s bird feeder. I asked them if they were bothered by the naming system people used to identify them. The response was a unanimous “chirp.”
I tried to engage the birds a little more to get a better sense of how they felt about this issue that has feathers so ruffled in the bird-watching community.
After some back and forth, I finally got a barn owl to open up. “We really don’t care what you call us,” the owl said.
The magpies squawked in agreement. “If you really cared about us birds, how about you quit destroying our habitat? Is that too much to ask?”
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.