March can be such a fickle month. It is a month when we all are so anxious to see an end to winter and a beginning of spring and then when March comes in like a lamb, we think we made it through another winter only to have our hopes dashed with storm after storm after storm pushing us around like a ship in a hurricane.

This March has been especially bad in that although there has been no really cold weather, it can be fifty above one day and then, like when these words are being written, the weatherman says that if it gets up to fifteen above we will be lucky.

And it snows, not a lot so much as over and over and over again. I feel sorry for those ranchers whose job it is to oversee 150 cows giving birth this month. That is not ever easy and is certainly more difficult than ever this March!

Oh, there has been a March or two that were very good. I remember a few when it was so spring like that animals started to come out of hibernation a month early just as if to celebrate the fact that winter is over.

But even if March is good to us, it is one of the most horrible of all months for terribly strong winds buffeting us around no matter what we do outside.

March 8 my father died in a freak car accident on Clear Creek. It was the start of a nice spring like March but I will never forget the night we went out to the cabin and found him. The wind was howling like eighteen banshees and from that time until now, terrible March winds will always remind me of that night.

Old timers used to note that this time of year the chickadee changes his song. I should not say old timers. The chickadee’s spring song is heard around mountain meadows and even in town this time of year, and every year. Instead of giving his normal cheery dee, dee, dee he gives a two note song, one higher than the other that sounds like a door bell.

What the old timers used to say most of all was that the Chickadee lies! You can hear the spring door bell song when there is nothing of spring in the air anywhere.

Readers may remember that on Ground Hog Day, way up in White Pine Gulch, the western ground hog, Marmaduke Marmot predicted that winter was over then for this year.

Well, I have just one thing to say about that. Like the chickadee, the marmot lies!