Yesterday, there was quiet to greet the sun; this morning, it's chickadees giving their "pee... dee..." calls, titmice sweetening the dawn with "Peter... Peter... Peter..." whistles, and woodpeckers drumming out call and response messages on dead limbs. Of course, based on natural history, it's a few weeks too early for any of this to be happening, but given the weirdly warm winter, despite a two-week stretch of reality weather, we're bearing witness to yet another sign of climate change—regardless of whom you assign the blame to... or what you think anyone should do about it. The flowering of the Winter Aconite, however, is probably not anything you can hang on global warming. Yesterday, the remarkably hardy and often exceptionally early plants were poking their flower buds out of the snow and muddy ground; today, with abundant sunshine and definite warmth in the air, Eranthis hyemalis is in full bloom. They're built for this—to provide garden gold at the earliest possible moment that the right amount of daylight tells them, "it's time."