Spring Breaks : Signs Abound as Season of Rebirth Officially Arrives
OK, so the sun is shining, the palm fronds are swaying ever so gently and the surfers are catching waves down at the beach. In Los Angeles, says Kristin Zabawa, that’s not enough to tell it’s spring.
For Zabawa, an animal keeper in the bird nursery of the Los Angeles Zoo, spring means baby birds.
“We’re just starting to get eggs,” she said Tuesday afternoon, shortly after feeding a 3-week-old black-footed South African penguin named Art. “Right now we have a king vulture egg--they’re from South America--and a tawny frogmouth.”
Spring officially arrived in Southern California on Tuesday at 1:19 p.m., marking the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the celestial Equator. Yet in a region where the weather may be the same on New Year’s Day as it is on the Fourth of July, the season of rebirth and renewal is, as Zabawa says, heralded by changes that transcend the climate.
The fragrance of night-blooming Jessamine (a cousin of jasmine, which won’t be blooming for another few weeks) sweetens the warm evening air. Rookie school begins for would-be Los Angeles County lifeguards, and the Baywatch boats get a fresh paint job. The fashion-conscious pull their crisp linen whites out of the closet. On the city’s Westside and in the Fairfax district, Passover matzo begins appearing on the supermarket shelves.
At Dodger Stadium, Bob Smith, director of stadium operations since 1962, is hurriedly preparing for the first cry of “Play Ball!”
“We’ve got gardeners and landscaping people, they’re working on the field, getting everything ready, planting flowers on the slopes, mowing and edging,” he says. “We’re hiring all our employees, the ushers, security people, ticket takers. . . . Everybody’s busy. The switchboard is lit up like a Christmas tree.”
At the Immaculate Conception School near downtown Los Angeles, paper Easter eggs are popping up on classroom walls and bulletin boards. “The kindergartners and first-graders have been growing plants for spring,” says Principal Mary Ann Murphy. “It’s been real exciting for them to watch new life happen.”
At Cal Poly Pomona, nursery technician Don DeLano sees spring in the colors of his flowers: bright red roses, dazzling yellow daffodils, paper white narcissus. “During the winter,” he says, “you get your muted colors. I call them somber shades--burgundies, bronzes, tans. You get mixes of brown into everything.”
And lest you entertain the false notion that there are no weather changes associated with springtime in Los Angeles, Scott Entrekin--a meteorologist for the National Weather Service--will happily set you straight.
According to Entrekin, long-term climatological studies show that in Southern California, the average chance of precipitation peaks during mid-February and then again in March--specifically on the 20th, the day winter turns into spring. Beginning today, he said, those chances embark on a downward slide toward summer.
“Generally,” he said, “when spring starts to roll around we become a lot drier. The chances of precipitation start to dwindle. The fog and low clouds increase.”
But that is of no interest to Pete Trilling, who along with his wife and young daughter, was wandering about the zoo Tuesday--a day when the temperature, which hit a high of 90 degrees in downtown Los Angeles, was more reminiscent of summer than spring.
Trilling, a Los Angeles police officer, said he moved here last year from South Dakota for one simple reason: “So we could have spring all the time.”
