Commentary: On cusp of spring, real March madness awaits outdoors

Mike Weilbacher

directs the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education

It's a monster day for college hoop nuts, a day now given its own name: Selection Sunday.

And - live on national TV - the brackets will be revealed, setting off a firestorm on Twitter, in chat rooms, at the water cooler. Monday morning, those brackets will be reprinted in hundreds of newspapers like this one, where they are dissected with more diligence than the parsing of Donald Trump's foreign policy.

We'll breathlessly argue over which teams "on the bubble" should've gotten in, who this year's Cinderella team will be, whether Villanova will finally make it past the second round - and drop a cool $2 billion betting on brackets.

More of us will fill out the brackets than voted in the last presidential election.

Meanwhile, nature in March is simply exploding. Flowers have already begun opening, an elegant parade blooming in an orchestrated sequence begun back in February, when skunk cabbages poked through the mud in wet areas, purple mottled hoods protecting a Sputnik-shaped flower. Just recently, the buds of red maples have popped to reveal tiny wind-pollinated flowers, little red spiders dangling from tree branches.

Soon, forests will be bursting with ephemeral wildflowers with names as evocative as the flowers are stunning: trout lily, Jack-in-the-pulpit, bloodroot, shooting star, Dutchman's breeches, Solomon's seal. With all apologies to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, here's the real flower show.

Meanwhile, migrating birds are undergoing their own rite of spring, flying through in progression, red-winged blackbirds and phoebes now, ruby-throated hummingbirds later. Waves of woodland warblers - tiny but unbelievably beautiful creatures wearing extraordinary coats of many colors - pass through like clockwork, pine and prairie warblers any moment, blackpolls bringing up the rear at season's end. They're all heading to nesting grounds north of here, only visiting the region for a few days on their journeys north and south. Blink and they're gone.

And butterflies soon begin awakening, mourning cloaks first, painted ladies soon, swallowtails in late April, and monarchs, just now leaving Mexico, much later.

Hibernators are crawling out of dens ready to start the new year. Already, painted turtles are basking alongside ponds, and American toads will soon be crossing a busy Roxborough street corner on a dark and stormy night to get to their mating grounds across the road. And any day now I expect to see the first groundhog of the season, likely nibbling on roadside grass blades.

That's the real March madness, that here we are, on the cusp of spring, having survived another wild and wooly winter, and we're not betting on the first day a phoebe arrives from the tropics or the first day a mourning cloak butterfly flitters into view. We're not inviting friends over for a beer to watch our crocuses unfold.

No, we're debating whether Austin Peay, a likely 16 seed, can wreak bracketology havoc.

The struggle for me as an environmental educator is that, as a nation, as a culture, we have collectively decided, quietly but quite definitively, that college basketball matters. Just look at the air time. Ink space. Coaches' salaries.

But nature? Not so much. Sure, it gets a weekly high-quality hour on PBS, but how are those spring wildflowers doing? How are migrating birds faring? How are the monarch butterflies, which are actually on the bubble as a species? Where's the Nature section of this newspaper? What's the salary of a starting ecologist studying a real Wildcat in the wild? The culture has spoken, and nature is too far down our list.

There's another part of this madness: nature's elegant springtime succession of flowers blossoming, trees leafing out, and birds migrating is in disarray because the symphony has a new conductor. While climate change is rearranging ancient patterns to an as-yet-unknown effect, the biggest experiment in the history of a planet, we're glued to TV sets arguing over who's better, Kansas or Michigan State.

So the real flower show has already started outdoors, in your backyard, in a forest near you. But we're stuck inside filling out brackets.

That's just madness.

@SCEEMike mike@schuylkillcenter.org.