The crows patrol this creek delta like rent-a-cops at a rock concert. One watches a few feet from the trail as my little dog passes by. Aki ignores it and the other crows policing the area. She doesn’t show any interest in the hundreds of migrating fowl that have stopped here for a top off before moving north. Only a small Kanji formed with found beach rocks intrigues the little dog. She barks, then growls like a Ewok before approaching it with head low. Looking a little foolish, Aki gauges my response to this new trail side shrine and then pads on down the beach.

Around the corner, Barrow goldeneyes are having a blast on the pond—splashing and rising up until almost free of the water and then more splashing. It’s 52 degrees and the sun brightens the dull, death beach grass until it competes with the snow covered mountains and glacier for our attention.

Last Sunday, while ecstatic over victories of my favorite sports teams, I wrote on Facebook, “It can rain all week in Juneau.” It almost did. Yesterday broke clear and we had sun all day but it didn’t seem like Spring. That night, not expecting more than a cold wind, I took Aki out for her pre-bed eliminations. While she searched for a deserving place to leave her sent, I looked up at a thin green vapor trail. It swirled into a vortex over my head, spinning closer and closer until I reached up to touch it. Other vapors joined it, some painting streaks of green over Mt. Maria while others expanded into a curtain over Mt. Juneau. Not willing to look away from the Northern Lights, I am still not sure if Aki took care of business. She did this morning, on the walk up to Gasteneau Meadows.

Cold settled over the meadow under last night’s Northern Lights to cover mud puddles on the approach road with thin panes of ice and hardened the meadow snow. The lights may have called the American robins north. We pass through a cloud of them traveling in the company of at least one thrush and a couple of grumpy jays. The Auroras may also have awaked the bear that dropped off the meadow after this morning’s sun rise. Our tracks cross the ones he left in softening snow. On the thinning meadow snow blanket we also find fresh tracks of an adult deer and later one that just survived its first winter.

The crisp, hard beauty of winter melted away in last night’s rain. Summer’s soft, sweet smelling promise is far away. We live and walk in a gray purgatory without a taste of the richer seasons. Rain soaked driftwood logs lay scattered on the wetlands like corpses on a battlefield. One shows more life—lifting a slender limb up and over to frame the flooded Mendenhall River. “There,” it seems say, “That way summer comes with its salmon, seals, and whales.”

Like intercity gangs, ravens and crows battle for turf in Juneau. The crows ruled Chicken Ridge when we first moved to the neighborhood. They would arrive at sunrise on a late March day like this, each member of their murder screaming taunts at the us from the limbs of Sitka Spruce trees. With this display of verb gang signs they staked out nesting areas for the summer’s crop of fledglings. One year they returned, found one spruce tree missing and never returned. Now a pair of frisky ravens controls our neighborhood skies. Unlike the cranky crows, the ravens tolerate the occasional visit by bald eagles.

On this morning’s walk we found our old crow neighbors staking out the trees along lower Fish Creek. After chasing off three bald eagles, they infested the little spruce covered island that forms part of the stream’s mouth. We heard but did not see them while circumnavigating the island. The strengthening spring sun robbed the glacier and surrounding mountains of drama but left us warm and content to let the crows rant.

This first taste of true spring might have affected Aki more than I. She shows little interest in passing dogs, and can only manage a half-hearted roll in the disappearing snow. At the end, I find the body of red breasted sapsucker. Even in death, it manages a spectacular display of red, yellow, and black against its snowy killing ground. Aki pays the corpse little attention but I can’t resist this chance for a close up view of the eye—dark, speckled pupil floating on a pale blue pond.