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The unusually warm weather has caused a strange reaction in both man and beasts. I have developed an uncontrollable urge to plant tomato plants and re-seed the lawn. Fortunately, the greenhouses do not as yet have tomato plants for sale; I checked. The guy at the greenhouse said he loves weather like this. Everybody gets in a hurry, buys and plants a bunch of things, and then they are back to do it over again in a month or so. We are living in the Midwest and the weather will change. Perhaps some year I will get lucky and have tomatoes ripe by the end of May, but probably not.

I was all ready to re-seed the lawn, but the guy at the hardware store is a friend of mine. He knows I would rather be hunting turkeys than planting lawn, but he was kind enough to encourage me to wait on the lawn until about the middle of turkey season. He did have the seed on hand but said if I started now, I would be re-planting during turkey season. A week or two of warm weather may be enough to germinate the seed but a week or two of freezing temperatures would kill the young tender grass seedlings.

Animals may get anxious just as people do. The vultures are back, soaring the skies high overhead. They usually do not return north until spring has sprung. I hope they are right about spring but it is awfully early to be past our cold weather. I only remember one time seeing a turkey vulture in a snowstorm. It was not a pretty sight. While driving down a gravel road on a balmy April day, the temperature started dropping precipitously. The windows on the truck that had been circulating the fresh spring air were rolled up to protect against the sudden cold snap. A few more miles and the heater was turned on. The snow then started in those huge wet clumps that are closer to being snowballs than snowflakes. Traveling slowly as I neared home with the snow rapidly building up, I noticed a vulture in a small tree in the road ditch. A turkey buzzard or vulture is not a pretty bird on a good day. With their naked pink head and unsavory habit of eating anything dead and disgusting makes them hard to love. I stopped and looked at this poor ugly bird and actually felt sorry for him. He was hunched up, obviously cold, with wet feathers hanging down. He could not have flown if he had too. I could only imagine him thinking, "I wish I would have waited a couple weeks before I migrated north."

The surest sign spring is really here is when morel mushrooms sprout. Stories are already being circulated about the first mushrooms of the season being harvested. This may be true, but in my experience, stories of the first mushrooms generally precede the actual spotting of them by two to three weeks. I would not call anybody a liar just because they have not produced the evidence, but I will not start the spring morel mushroom hunting frenzy on hearsay evidence.

We have experienced a remarkable winter and a very pleasant start to the spring season. With all the signs around from the turkeys gobbling to the vultures migrating, spring could actually be here, maybe. I just am not convinced enough to plant tomatoes or re-seed the lawn. We could still see cold birds in the roadside ditches before summer.[[In-content Ad]]

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