Last week, while my brother and his wife basked in Cuba, I stared glumly at a winter storm warning bar across the top of the weather page which spoke of snow beginning later in the day, snow at times heavy falling all night, and then ice pellets.

I’m going to ask people to forego travel. Why should they be allowed to escape all of this?

A story appearing in a Toronto newspaper this morning says that spring will be cold in Canada (it just keeps on getting better, doesn’t it?). There is, apparently, a cooling trend in sea surface temperatures over in the Pacific Ocean, which can lead to a weakening of El Nino, allowing cold arctic air to come down into the southern parts of the country, “which will keep temperatures at or below normal for the next several months.”

Well, that’s what Canada can expect. But if you read the story to the end, however, this is a happy zinger at the very last sentence. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island can look forward to near normal precipitation this spring, the Weather Network story intones. And then: “Only Nova Scotia and parts of Newfoundland and Labrador can expect spring temperatures above normal.”

All right, then. We can go back to being optimistic about spring, and to heck with the Upper Canadians.

And right on schedule, the hummingbirds are making their way back to our yard. Hummingbirds have their own web page – hummingbirds.net – on which people keep track of their progress over the weeks as they move out of the tropics, up the eastern seaboard and home to Nova Scotia (among other summer locations). Right now, maps show that the hummers are moving through central Florida.

The whole idea of migration is endlessly fascinating to those with an interest in the natural world. Hummingbirds always show up in our yard on the very day that the japonica blossoms first come out. How do they do that?

The website speculates that hummingbirds follow a set route year after year. They are tropical birds that, as the last ice age retreated, may have learned to travel in search of better and better sources of food. We think of them as eating mainly the nectar from flowers and the syrup we provide in feeders, but their prime source of food is bugs. So, while they do well here during the warm months, when the bugs disappear they have to return south in order to find food, fetching up in southern Mexico and northern Panama.

They actually begin their journey north, research shows, in early January. They fatten up for a non-stop flight across the Gulf of Mexico – some 800 kilometres – and when in North America make about 32 kilometres a day. They apparently vary their speed according to when their favourite flowers are opening, so their arrival just as our japonicas are blooming is based on the rate at which other blossoms have appeared on the route up.

The males apparently travel about 10 days in advance of the females, reminding me of a cousin whose husband, after the summer holidays, used to fly back to Washington several days in advance of my cousin, who then had to load the kids in her Volkswagen van and drive them back. She eventually obtained a divorce.

The hummingbirds don’t all travel in one pack, but are spread out over a fairly large territory. Some arrive early, some late, but the general migration is over around the end of May. In this fragrant spot in the world, the hummingbirds arrived last year on Sunday, May 14, which was also Mothers’ Day, and the day I first got out the lawn mower and mowed the lawn. That was also the day I used the barbecue for the first time of the season, so it was a pretty momentous day.

Of course, the hummingbirds had arrived back earlier along the shore. Reports from last year actually showed the first hummingbirds showing up somewhere near Liverpool on April 30. If you want to see for yourself where the hummingbirds are on a given day, there is a link to the site on the Queens County Times.

Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppard@tdcmail.ca