robin snow

English

Alternative forms

• robin's snow

Noun

robin snow (plural robin snows)

1. (US, dialectal, especially New England and New York) A light, brief snow.
   • 1893, Maria Louise Pool, Dally, page 25:

     Though it was the last of March, there was a "robin snow" falling outside, and Mr. Winslow was believed by his family to have a weak throat, though he never manifested any signs of such weakness.

   • 1906, Henry David Thoreau, Journal:

     [page 290:] Observed the track of a squirrel in the snow under one of the apple trees on the southeast side of the Hill, andl, looking up, saw a red squirrel with a nut or piece of frozen apple […] Snowed again last night, as it has done once or twice before within ten days without my recording it, — robin snows, which last but a day or two.
     [page 462:] He says that the most snow we have had this winter (it has not been more than one inch deep) has been only a “robin snow,” as it is called, i.e. a snow which does not drive off the robins.

   • 1910, Winthrop Packard, Woodland Paths:

     [page 68:] Instead, they lay there dead, covering all things a half-inch deep with soft bodies of purest white, and we looked forth in the morning and said that there had been a robin-snow. It is a pity that those gentle, innocent gray-blue spring mists should […]
     [page 69:] A few more robin-snows and they will all be out. Very likely somewhere a dandelion, some sturdy, rough-and-ready youngster, quivered into yellow florescence at the caress. Robin-snows and the cajoling sun of the last week of March often ...

   • 1941, Nature Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly with Popular Articles about Nature, page 219:

     After a half-hour or so they fall again like a "robin snow" in spring and resume their feeding, white dots on the olive-brown of the long miles of saw grass that stretch away to the everglades horizon.

   • 1947, Mari Sandoz, The Tom-walker: A New Novel:

     After a robin snow in May, George Shefton went to Denver and so Milton and Stevie set out on the road again, three shoes and a worn pipe-end on the dashboard while Dump and Dolly switched their lazy tails over the lines […]

   • 1949, Joseph Nelson, Backwoods Teacher:

     We had another February snow — a robin snow which came in the night and was gone before noon.

   • 1977, Lew Dietz, Night Train at Wiscasset Station:

     In an earlier day, a snow that fell in April was called a “robin snow.” It was said to draw the last frost from the ground and bring the earthworms to the surface. This white incursion is gratefully brief.

Anagrams

• Winnsboro