Apr 16, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Margaret Carney
I had to laugh when a reader gently pointed out recently that I'm always writing about birds. He wasn't complaining, just stating a fact, and possibly hinting that there are other marvellous things in nature worth talking about.
And I agree! Spring constellations, northern lights, butterflies overwintering as adults, muskrats, snowshoe hares, fishers, blue-bottle flies hatching out ... I can think of a dozen timely topics I'd love to write about this very week. Not to mention the masses of delicate spring flowers popping up in every Ontario woods these days.
Following that last thought, and the adage "April showers bring May flowers," I started musing about the wet weather we've been having lately and how spring rains usher in new growth and renewal around the planet.
I had mental images from TV of all those wildebeests and gazelles plodding across dusty plains in Africa, hyenas and lions on their heels, all of them delighted when the rains returned and the world became lush and green again. I thought of the pre-Aswan Dam Nile flooding and retreating, leaving the delta soils of Egypt fertile for planting. I thought of the crashing thunder and lightning of the Wet in northern Australia, and the monsoons in India, and realized I had little understanding of why seasonal rains even happen.
Curious, I went off to research the topic. Because I was in the cabin at the sugar bush, without phones, computers, electricity or a library, I asked my husband.
He gamely told me yet again about how the Earth being tilted on its axis results in the sun appearing to move farther north or south in the sky throughout the year as we rotate around it. The sun's rays reach Earth from directly overhead in a twice-annual sweep from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. On March 21, it's directly over the Equator, and every day until June 21 "moves" continually northward, warming the terrain it shines down upon.
That heating causes great amounts of water to evaporate from wetlands, lakes and oceans and rise high into the atmosphere until it cools enough to turn back into water and fall as precipitation. Near the equator, this convection happens daily, resulting in lush rain forests along the Amazon and Zaire Rivers, in Borneo and Papua New Guinea.
More convection happens wherever the sun is shining hottest, resulting in seasonal monsoons nearby, be it India, Arizona or central Mexico.
The fluid movement of air masses caused by differences in pressure often pulls rain clouds hundreds of miles from their source. Every April, low fronts from the warming Gulf of Mexico come all the way to Ontario, bringing our May flowers and a host of beautifully-coloured songbirds from the tropics. Hurray!
Nature queries: 905-725-2116 or
mcarney@interlinks.net.
Durham resident Margaret Carney, in addition to writing nature-appreciation columns, has also published several children's books.
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