I squished my first mosquito of the year yesterday.
It must be spring.
It was inevitable, of course. Whatever happens here on the ground to excite or upset humans, the planet continues on its orbit around the Sun. And with that, the seasons change. After winter, comes spring.
And with spring come mosquitoes, whining bloodsucking irritants that they are.
The assessment of the seasonal shifts isn’t based on just that one milestone event, of course. Other signs back it up.
They’re a bit more spread out in this part of the world, where spring is a long, slow yawn of plant and animal life rousing in response to increasing daily temperatures and more sunlight.
In places such as Iqaluit, where daytime temperatures remain around the –20 C mark, Yellowknife, where the high today is forecast to be –5 C, and Whitehorse, where temperatures this week crept about 0 C, spring springs later and much more quickly. There’s so much growing, nesting, mating, breeding, fledging, seeding and so on to cram into the few months each year when growing, nesting, mating, breeding, fledging, seeding and so on are possible in those places.
So many mosquitoes must hatch and reproduce, generation upon generation, in so little time.
But here, we take things much more slowly. And the signs are stacking up.
The longer days are welcome. Outdoor temperatures, which typically vary only a couple of degrees from day to day and five to 10 degrees from day to night, are staying mostly above 0 C.
There’s also the disconnect between what the clock on the wall says and what our body clocks say. The difference confirms we’re newly returned to Pacific Daylight Saving Time, despite all the hoopla, anticipation and couched, qualified promises made by the sa国际传媒 government a few years ago.
The daffodils, the plum blossoms down the road and the friskiness of the local robins, towhees and bushtits also signal the change of seasons.
The burgeoning of new growth outside diversifies the shades of green on view. The lawn needs mowing, the flower beds have their first crop of weeks to pull, the first, tender leaves are emerging on the early shrubs.
Our neighbour has been out weeding, pruning and gardening for the past several weeks. (We’ll leave that for several months more, and the difference in timing will be evident through the rest of the year.)
We recently noted honeybees and bumblebees on the winter-flowering shrubs. Cabbage white butterflies fluttered by.
And a mosquito landed on my arm.
The children in the local parks and playgrounds during the day are another sign of the return of that annual ritual called spring break.
Further to that, the loosening of pandemic-related health restrictions, timed this year and last for the start of the spring holiday, has also occurred. The post-break results should be better this time around.
With more people vaccinated and no new and particularly deadly strain of the COVID virus in health officials’ sights at this time, the travel restrictions that were implemented last spring are much less likely.
Two years — three springs or over 700 days — under COVID brought out the best of many of us. And it also brought out the worst of many of us.
According to an Angus Reid survey conducted in the first week of March, 82 per cent of Canadians polled believe the pandemic has pulled us apart. About the same number say COVID has brought out the worst in people. Nearly two-thirds say Canadians’ level of compassion for one another has weakened.
The survey results for British Columbia are less extreme, positively or negatively, than for other provinces. However, we did report being slightly less pessimistic than other Canadians about the country’s ability to deal with future pandemics.
That last reflects well on the measured, considered, transparent and consistently evidence-based approach to the pandemic that provincial health officer Bonnie Henry and other sa国际传媒 public health leaders have taken over the last two years. Other provinces had other approaches and priorities, with those regions’ survey results reflecting those.
And while the sa国际传媒 restrictions lift, so, too, does the gloom of winter.
After winter, comes spring.
