By John Parker, INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine

In the Indian state of Orissa, the black-headed oriole is the messenger of spring. It appears in the villages in January to greet the season’s start and flies away to the forest in March, signalling its end. Richard Mahapatra’s mother used the oriole’s fleeting appearance to teach her son about the natural rhythms of the world. “People like my mother remember six distinct seasons,” says Mahapatra, an environmental writer who now lives in New Delhi. After spring (basanta) and summer (grishma) came the rainy season (barsha). Between autumn (sarata) and winter (sisira) came a dewy period called hemanta. Each season lasted two months and the appearance of each was marked by religious festivals. “She had precise dates for their arrival and taught me how to look for signs of each.”

Read more at: INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, spring 2010

Ed: This article actually came out last year (and I didn’t get around to posting it) but it was so fascinating that it really deserves some more airtime again in 2011. It skillfully brings in the cultural dimensions alongside the natural phenology. And with relevance to research at eyes4earth.org, it covers how ‘culturally meaningful signs’  in nature may be at risk through climate change. Can the same be said for ecological degradation such as from the impacts of invasive species?