robin snow

plural robin snows · alternative robin's snow

1. New EnglandNew YorkUSdialectalespeciallyA light, brief snow.

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

   1949, Joseph Nelson, Backwoods Teacher

   5 more examples

   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.

   1893, Maria Louise Pool, Dally, page 25

   [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.

   1906, Henry David Thoreau, Journal

   [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 ...

   1910, Winthrop Packard, Woodland Paths

   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.

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

   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 […]

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