Au Revoir, Summer!

It’s August - better known as the month I ruin by complaining the whole time that the summer is almost over. I love spring and early summer: the birds, the soft sunshine, the longer days, and the relaxed let’s-get-together-outside nature of friendships. But in August, the birds grow more quiet. The garden goes from abundant to weedy and overgrown. The sun seems too hot and the days too short. And the first day of the coming semester looms like a shadow over my carefully-cultivated summer-break calm and tranquility.

"Baby Eastern Bluebird" by Mark Theriot CC BY-NC-NC 2.0

But, as often happens when I take a long walk down our country road, nature had a lesson to teach me this morning. I was reminded that life comes in seasons and the fullness of life doesn’t diminish in fall and winter. It simply changes. Even though the birds may get quieter and begin to migrate away, there is still a wonderful bird-ness about August. Today I saw flocks of blackbirds and Canada geese feeding on the cut grain fields. I saw young, speckle-breasted bluebirds, trying their hand at hunting for insects, which are plentiful in the August heat. In fact, I saw lots of juvenile birds, and heard them, too; the beauty of the dawn chorus has been replaced by the amusing sounds of recent fledglings trying to mimic the adults. I heard a Northern Flicker cry out over and over again, in a time with the adults have mostly grown silent - it even attempted drumming a few times against the hollow wood of a snag. A fluffy little blue jay, in a rare moment of vulnerability for such a tough, canny species, cawed over and over again.

"Mother's Love" by Victoria Samuel USFWS CC BY 2.0

And then I looked through binoculars at a funny brown spot at the edge of the distant wood and made out a turkey, and then another turkey, and then lots of turkeys straggling in and out of the boundary of the wood: four hens and the twelve poults of their collective nursery. Later I saw a fawn, grown quite big but still with spots, looking at me curiously. Then it followed its mother across the road and disappeared into a cornfield. August is still alive - and magical.

And I relearned the rather trite lesson that everything has its season. We must move on to fall, and fall will be beautiful in its own way. Then there’s Christmas, and winter, and those first couple of snowfalls are indeed breathtaking. There may be fewer birds left at that point, but they’re easier to get to know. They spend their time nearer to us as we bring food to the feeder and crack the ice on the birdbath, and we can observe them more readily on the bare branches of trees. Then, just when we think we can’t take winter any longer, there are those marvelous days of March that hint at spring. Slowly, once again, the world comes back to life. And then I spend another August trying not to lament the end of summer.

"Sunset over Cornfield," by Johan Neven CC BY 2.0

I think we’re seasonal creatures living in a culture that tries to erase the seasons. We live a moderate-temperature life in our homes, no matter the weather outside. We buy strawberries and apples all year round. Christmas decorations show up in Walmart starting in September. It feels good to be outside on an August day, observing the specific pulse of life that happens only in August, and to bid summer au revoir rather than adieu.

Driving My Dad, Part 1

In the last several years of his life, my father and I loved to go on car rides together. I would drive while he would point out landmarks: a creek where people used to be baptized, the location of one of the peach sheds that marked Arkansas’s long ago past as a major peach producer, a hillside thick with cedar trees indicating the presence of limestone. He knew so much about the history and the topography of southwest Arkansas, and I always learned a lot.

These car rides harkened back to many such car rides with him when I was a little girl. I loved to ride in the car, snooze on and off, and stare out the window and daydream as he told me long and (to my child’s mind) boring stories about his work life or a civil engineer’s view on the merits of asphalt versus concrete roadways. (I’ll never forget one car ride adventure, when I was around eight or nine years old. We stopped at a gas station, and I asked if I could have some money to buy some candy. “Sure,” he said and gave me a dollar. A week or so later he asked, “Where’s that dollar you owe me?” A child of the Depression for sure!)

In later years, there was something that frustrated him more and more on our rides together. He would see a brushy fencerow, or a stand of scraggly trees along the side of the road, or a weedy pasture, and shake his head in disgust. “Who would let that go to waste like that? I hate to see it!” he would complain fiercely. “I just don't know why a person or a government would allow that to happen.” That would lead into a discussion, again a civil engineer’s view of the world: rivers are meant to produce power, fields are meant to nurture crops or feed animals or grow pine trees for the local paper mills, and roadsides are meant to look neat and clean and tidy, showcasing good management of shared public property.

I look at those same scraggly places and see sources of food and cover for wildlife, fields that could grow grasses to sustain the breeding of the many grassland bird species now in rapid decline, and roadsides of bee-covered wildflowers and weeds. “But Daddy, what about the wildlife?” I would ask, knowing how much he loved birds and wildlife, too. He would grunt or answer noncommittally and move on to the next topic. I got the message: wildlife shouldn’t get in the way of progress.

Dad’s point of view made me think of centuries of rugged people in America logging forests, diverting waterways, building canals and bridges, and mowing lawns. They saw the land as something to be put to use and managed, something that would help them survive or make them grow rich. And the land and water have given us much. I’ve written previously about how we’ve also developed a preference for mowed yards and careful landscaping, a containment of nature. But it seems to me that we’re realizing now the importance of the scraggly, the unmanaged, the wild.

A few days ago I returned from spending a month in China, where I observed the manifestations of a cultural and historical context that has viewed nature as something to be organized, managed, and brought into harmony. More on that in Part 2. Hint: this photo of a tree-planting project shows neat, weed-free rows of one species of tree, with the same precisely-measured distance between each individual. I think Dad would approve!

20 Minutes of Wildlife

A sense of disappointment always sets in for me in August, as the songbird mating season comes to an end and the birds fall silent, and then they start to leave the area, and then the summer insect sounds die away, and then the butterflies fade, and then the first hard frost comes and most of the plants still managing to produce in my garden freeze and die. Although frenetic animal activity begins - such as the white-tailed deer rut and the pre-hibernation feeding frenzy of groundhogs and other burrowing rodents - it doesn’t seem to provide the same pleasure as springtime viewings of fawns and muskrats and bunnies. By November, I feel hopelessly distanced from the natural world.

But it’s really not true that the world of wildlife disappears or even slows down. I was just reviewing my notes from a 20-minute walk I took in mid November. In just 20 short minutes, I saw a female turkey, a young white-tailed buck, and a mink. The birds were crazy with activity, and in a short stroll along a creek I saw a pair of mallards, a mockingbird, several robins, several cardinals, a bunch of male bluebirds fussing at each other and chasing each other through the trees, juncos, goldfinches, and 20 or so yellow-rumped warblers flying down to drink and then back up into the trees. I heard a song sparrow, a Northern flicker, and crows. And I’m sure there were many other animals in my vicinity who saw me but remained beyond my notice.

One of my very favorite books is Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). An experienced tracker, Young explains how understanding bird behavior and sounds can clue one in to many aspects of the natural world. Birds have different songs to indicate different kinds of predators: those on the ground, those coming through the trees, those high up in the air. Their flight patterns also indicate where a predator or food source might be. Young recommends that you sit in the same spot everyday, remain quiet until the birds forget you are there, and then observe. You will quickly begin to distinguish different kinds of calls and activities, particularly if you focus on one species. Fall and winter are ideal times to do this because you remove certain activities and calls related to mating and nesting from the equation, leaving fewer factors to consider in your study. And without leaves on the trees, the birds are much easier to find and keep track of.

Winter can be ideal for learning about other wildlife, too, particularly when there is snow on the ground and you can see tracks. A basic book of mammal and bird tracks is a helpful guide to identifying tracks, and following them can give you clues to an animal’s route, particular behavior, and even the location of a winter den.

Nature organizations and national parks host lots of activities in the winter to help people experience the natural world. My local Audubon society is offering free bird-watching trips, a tree identification workshop, a tracks identification workshop, and several lectures over the next couple of weeks to help people fend off the indoor ennui of winter. I hope you’ll join me in finding opportunities to take advantage of winter and take yourself back out into the natural world to see just how alive it is - at all times of the year.