As the last patches of snow melt away and the first green shoots emerge from the soil, we find ourselves on the cusp of a cosmic turning point. The spring equinox—arriving on Thursday, March 20, 2025—marks nature’s official transition from winter’s embrace to spring’s awakening in Illinois.
This celestial event, also known as the vernal equinox, carries a beautiful symmetry. For this brief moment, our planet achieves perfect balance as the sun positions itself directly above the equator. The result? Day and night stand as equals, each claiming precisely half of our 24-hour cycle before the scales gradually tip toward longer, brighter days in the Northern Hemisphere.
This equality can create some pretty neat opportunities to experience nature that can only occur on an equinox. One of these opportunities includes finding the cardinal compass points known as due east and due west. On the day of the equinox, go outside at sunrise (to find east) or sunset (to find west) and notice where the sun is in the sky to the landmarks around your home. In the future, you can use these same landmarks to help tell which direction is east and west.
What makes this astronomical event so special is not just its mathematical precision, but what it represents. As the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the sun, we witness nature’s response: earlier sunrises painting the morning sky, twilight stretching longer into the evening, and perhaps most delightfully, the emergence of new life pushing through the soil.
If you’re looking for other ways to celebrate the spring equinox this year, here are some ideas:
- Take a nature walk using our Spring Nature Walk Bingo Card.
- Make your time outdoors more meaningful by keeping a Nature Notebook.
- Start seeds for your garden. Visit a local shop for seeds or check out your local library to see if they have a seed library. Use this great article from National Wildlife Federation as a guide for starting seeds this spring.
- Check out a picture book about spring from your local library. We love this list of books for children from the Rock Island Public Library.
- Adopt a storm drain. The rainy season is here, which means leaves and debris can easily get trapped in our storm drains. Keeping safety in mind, find out where the storm drains are in your neighborhood and make a commitment to help keep them free of leaves and litter so water can flow freely to the river!
To learn more about how to celebrate the spring equinox and see some of these ideas in action, check out our segment on Quad Cities Live with our River Health and Resiliency Organizer, Nina Struss.
