There is an actual bird, the Common Snow-Bird, or dark-eyed junco, that migrates south from the cold in groups. John James Audubon, the great naturalist and painter, once wrote of the snowbird, “The migration of these birds is performed by night, as they are seen in a district one day and have disappeared the next.” Then he added, “So gentle and tame does the Snow-bird become on the least approach of hard weather that it forms, as it were, a companion to every child. Indeed, there is not an individual in the Union who does not know the little Snow-bird, which, in America, is cherished as the Robin is in Europe.”

With the frost nipping at their heels, they flock here in a pattern of seasonal migration, like moths to a flame, in search of sunshine, blue skies, and ocean breezes, swelling the population of Florida, staying longer than overnight, and perhaps with more mixed affection than their feathered counterpart.

Snowbirds.