Fire watches so early! Look out!

What happened to winter? Did it get sucker-punched by spring? The National Weather Service has been issuing Fire Watch warnings for the area for a few weeks. Yikes. The weather has been crazily warm, hardly any snow or moisture. Yet, cyclonic winds ripped off shingles and toppled trees in March. I remember the saying we learned in grade school. March: In like a lion and out like a lamb.

Not this year. The lion ate the lamb. And it’s still hungry. There are fires already kicking up around the country and one recently right here in Lovell. Months ahead of our traditional fire season. This year’s unseasonably warm winter has signaled spring to Mother Nature. Our peonies are coming up and trees are leafing out. Lilacs are getting ready to flower. We have a flicker that visits in the spring and drums his love call on the aluminum cap of our roof vent. I call him Bullet. He’s our 7:30 wake up call. Birds are singing at dawn. A cold snap now will be devastating.

The last few years the weather has gotten weirder and weirder, mostly hotter. Climate change, global warming, whatever you want to call it, it looks pretty real from where I’m sweating.

I have a background in agricultural journalism. I remember reading a university research journal’s article on how global warming would change our planet’s agronomy belts. As I read those pages, this is what I gleaned: The world’s equatorial and tropical belts would heat up and dry out into expansive deserts. The temperate areas where farming currently flourishes would be pushed northward, increasing growing seasons in northern states. Snowpack in the mountains would diminish. Dry and moist areas would shift due to the warming of the oceans and how they drive cold fronts. I don’t remember how they expected that to play out exactly, but there was an expectation that in traditional bread basket regions crop yields would diminish.

Warming oceans are bad for fisheries, displacing species and disrupting the delicate balance of those food chains. Land based critters, too, will suffer and shuffle to adjust. Some animals will be crowded out by more adaptive species. Extinction is not off the table for those species relying on very specific habitats. Those mammals dependent on sea life will have a real struggle as shorelines move inland due to melting ice caps, which is already happening. Polar bears are already showing up south of their traditional territories.

There are other signs that this might be happening. Mountains and foothills look devoid of snow in some ranges. Game animals, predators and the species that support them are becoming scarce in areas. Our reservoirs and lakes are at near-record or record lows. We didn’t get much of a winter freeze or precipitation this year. People who’ve lived in this area for decades are saying they’ve never seen a winter this warm, or seen surrounding peaks snowless like this in February/March.

One idea: Water your trees, lawns and landscaping sooner than later. They’re probably thirsty.