Yesterday, I saw the first robin on High Street and robins were chirping in the back yard in the evening. Pussy willows were half out, and Lori Deal, who owns “The Shop” downtown, said her neighbor’s yard was full of blooming crocus and that she even saw a bumblebee. Today, a spring blizzard moved over Yellow Springs, high winds swirling the snow from the rooftops.

The birds fed heavily in the storm. By midmorning, a flock of red-winged blackbirds, males and females, the first flock of the year, descended on the back feeder. The first grackles and cowbirds showed up, too. For hours, the resident starlings, house sparrows, song sparrows, titmice, chickadees and cardinals vied with the new arrivals for positions on the seed bell, the suet and the tube feeders. Under the arbor, a small flock of gold finches clung to the thistle sacks, the wind swinging them back and forth and around in circles. Juncos cleaned up after them below. When I went out to get wood about five o’clock in the afternoon, the blackbirds had moved a few hundred yards over to Greg’s property and were cackling and whistling as though the sun were shining.

So in the middle of the worst storm in recent memory, the landmarks of spring continued to appear. The arrival of the robins, blackbirds, grackles and cowbirds affirmed the cardinal, titmouse and dove calls that had marked the advance of early spring through the last weeks of February and the first week of March. The blizzard was not a sign of the return of winter so much as it was one face of this changeable season, its winds bringing summer migrants back, the deep snow obscuring but preserving the hesitant progress made in the first days of the month, the first crocus and snowdrops, the spears of daffodil foliage.