Saturday, February 05, 2005

A Flock of February Robins

A flock of robins settle into the backyard in the middle of the afternoon. A hard count of eight and probably more dispersed and tossing up the leaf litter exposed by the snow melt. The first week of February and daytime temperatures wander into the upper forties. The unusual warmth has all the birds out looking for food. Slate colored juncos flit around among the robins while flickers and hairy woodpeckers search for bugs. Even the cardinals are in the brush rather than the feeders. Warmth always appears to stimulate the variety and abundance life.

Channel3000, the local CBS affiliate website, lists the record high for this date and place back in 1946, about two generations ago right after the end of the world war against industrial fascism. Mathematically, chaos theory demonstrates that complex systems such as the weather are unpredictable without total knowledge of the starting points, but there are limits or boundaries to the range of possibilities. A warm winter day is not unprecedented and not inconsistent with the observable past.

This afternoon warmth will fade away fast as the sunlight fades into night. The great foundation law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, guarantees the fact. Nineteenth Century science developed and fine tuned the scientific method which first and foremost requires that theory explain the reality of observation and measurement. Unconfined in open systems, heat always disperses. A poured cup of coffee will always cool off, the ice in the whiskey will always melt, and the heat from fire will be gone in the morning if the fuel burns out.