STERLING - Winter aconite, tiny yellow buds of flowers, have bloomed the earliest ever recorded this year in the lawn of Cayuga County's Sterling Nature Center. It's been a month since the foreign flower, native to the Alp mountains of Switzerland, Austria and Italy, first blossomed.

With this unique plant ironically giving the first hint of spring, the center was inspired to hold its second annual winter openhouse on a blustery and frigid Saturday.

Winter aconite have been blooming for decades at the center, a remnant of formal gardens planted when aluminum magnate Christopher Jensvold owned the property. He died in 1959.

Native flowers will not open up until much later this year, but Jensvold's gardener planted a variety of flowers that keep some floral species blooming between February to October.

On this March day, a bitter wind blew straight into the faces of onlookers venturing to the center's overlook of Lake Ontario. Whitecaps broke on the lake's midnight-blue water before slamming into the crystallized floes of snow hugging the shore. Iceberg-like piles of ice covered the beach.

The lake's water has been warmer this year, said center director Jim D'Angelo, pushing lake effect weather to only form more inland and keeping back piles of snow at the center.

D'Angelo spotted frogs swimming in the center's wetlands in January.

A hardy 20 people or so braved the brisk wind, many for D'Angelo's talk and guided walk about how insects survive the winter. Others came for the stark, but powerful, landscape.

Dick Dasans, of Oswego, walks his chubby Labrador Retriever at the center every day. Marsha Moshier and her daughter, Meredith, also brought their Lab with frisky puppy tendencies to the center Saturday.

“We walk our dog here in the winter, fall, summer, spring,” said Marsha Moshier, of Oswego.

The Dasans' and the Moshiers' dogs share the same seven years of life, along with the same name, Jesse.

The Dasans' chocolate brown female and Moshier's black male sniffed each other and chased after each other in wild, active turns as their owners chatted in a milder fashion about the center's pleasures.

Six hikers from the Adirondack Mountain Club's Onondaga chapter made a four-mile hike from Fair Haven to the center along the county's snowmobile trails.

The trip was worth it when they sighted a bald eagle and turkey tracks on their way, said member Gail Opanhoske.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net