Daily Readers August Ends — Sunday, 31 August 2008 Presence — Saturday, 30 August 2008 Last of the Year — Friday, 29 August 2008 Kangaroo-Rat — Thursday, 28 August 2008 Amanitas — Wednesday, 27 August 2008 Mortal Rubbing — Tuesday, 26 August 2008 Time on the Patio — Monday, 25 August 2008 Tadpole-Shrimp — Sunday, 24 August 2008 Part of the Glory — Saturday, 23 August 2008 Peeping — Friday, 22 August 2008 Master of All — Thursday, 21 August 2008 Nighthawk Passage — Wednesday, 20 August 2008 Eyes in the Dark — Tuesday, 19 August 2008 Yellow-headed Twiggery — Monday, 18 August 2008 Orb-Weavers — Sunday, 17 August 2008 Rain Check — Saturday, 16 August 2008 Clacking — Friday, 15 August 2008 Puffballs — Thursday, 14 August 2008 Alpine Avens — Wednesday, 13 August 2008 Garter-Snake Dreams — Tuesday, 12 August 2008 Pika Art — Monday, 11 August 2008 Twilight Tryst — Sunday, 10 August 2008 Cicada Cadence Call — Saturday, 9 August 2008 Horned Lizardlings — Friday, 8 August 2008 Dragonfly Evening — Thursday, 7 August 2008 Late-Summer Nighttime — Wednesday, 6 August 2008 Late-Summer Evening — Tuesday, 5 August 2008 Late-Summer Midday — Monday, 4 August 2008 Late-Summer Morning — Sunday, 3 August 2008 Gumweed Phenomenon — Saturday, 2 August 2008 August Begins — Friday, 1 August 2008
This morning begins more than a new day, for August spans more than a collection of days; it embodies a season unto itself. And seasons have limited time to accomplish their task.
Most sunflowers have peaked; the butterflies have laid their eggs.
Baby birds now feed themselves; a few determined cicadas tick on, the droners now silent; bats chitter through the night...elsewhere.
August has done its work supporting Life’s progeny, positioning them all to enter the competition of survival. It is the work of a season that stands alone.
Autumn. Winter. Spring. Summer. August.
And so the season ends.
The Field Bindweed clambering over the Rubber Rabbitbrush is an intruder; it intrudes upon this steppe where it now grows.
The Black Tern skimming the pond is a visitor; it visits this marsh each mid spring and late summer.
The Northern Pygmy-Owl roosting in the Ponderosa Pine is a neighbor; it and the pines in some part define the character of their neighborhood.
I do not live in the steppes, marshes, or treelands that beckon to me; so with each footfall of each trip afield, I must contemplate my presence: am I the Bindweed, the Tern, or the Owl?
The mountain meadow no longer shimmers green and blue. Grasses that greened the meadow now whisper tan and buff; Silvery Lupines that started blooming last May still grow in place but now sport dull legumes where blue-indigo flowers once were.
The plains pasture no longer vibrates with activity. The Eastern Cottonwood and telephone wires where vituperative Western Kingbirds held court now stand empty.
The Kingbirds and Lupines are not yet gone; they have just moved on in their own lives, one to new pastures, one to a new life stage. But they signal the last of their kind for this year.
This little troughlike pit beneath the yuccas tells so much.
It is the work of a nocturnal, fossorial, saltatorial animal with often droopy eyelids and laid-back ears and always a down-curved snout and a weak chin.
The foot-long pit of dusty sand does not reveal such physical detail; rather, location, size, and material identify the maker and frequent user.
This is a dust-bathing pit of an Ord’s Kangaroo-Rat. It wallows in the dry, sandy soil to clean its tawny-and-white fur.
Artifacts of behavior thus confer identity of a creature unseen. The eyes see the pit; the mind sees the Kangaroo-Rat.
Bright mounds arcing in a colorful line of oranges and reds, each sporting fleshy tabs of ivory white, bulge from the pine needle duff. They are amanitas, mushrooms that play havoc with one’s grasp of reality when eaten and long used as a source of insecticide to kill flies.
To gaze upon them neither harms the eyes nor taints the faculties; yet they are a curious paradox: their beauty, tonic for the spirit; their flesh, poison to the mind.
Such paradox makes worthwhile reflection for a naturalist: Take nothing more than what the mushroom gives, whatever your "mushroom" might be.
The little tree stands mortally wounded, its middle branches broken, its thin bark peeled to bare wood all around its slender trunk.
It had no chance once it caught the eye of the Elk.
He was not huge for his kind, but he outmatched his opponent. And he had an urge, something compelling and undeniable.
First, he casually brushed his modest antlers against the flexible boughs. Then, the encounters became more serious, more intense; brushing became rubbing became thrashing.
And when the Elk lost interest, his antlers were polished free of their velvet, and the little tree stood mortally wounded.
The books I read and the television I watch tempt me to believe that wildlife dwells in far-off lands, but Life itself brings reality to my own space.
Perhaps it is the underwing-moth resting beneath my eave or Big Brown Bats that work the evenings or Mourning Doves that fill the mornings.
Perhaps it is the Green Darners on patrol or Salsify fruits riding the breeze or crab-spiders stalking the fence.
Life is not about size or power, about exotic or faraway; Life is about living.
I can sample it richly for a little time spent sitting on the patio.
Dark forms ease through the water, and the careless eye tries to make them everything they are not.
They are too slow for a fish but too fast for a snail. They do not undulate like a leech nor wriggle like a tadpole. They have neither the shape of a snake nor the size of a salamander.
Yet here they are haunting the rainwater that pools in low spots on the plains.
Scooped into cupped hands, the three-inch ghosts appear for all the world like tiny horseshoe-crabs.
Crustaceans of another ilk, they are tadpole-shrimps, treasures of thundershowers that bathe the steppe.
The snowfields have vanished so that plants once bathed in frigid snowmelt are now drenched in scorching sunlight. Too-hot-and-too-cold summarizes life on the tundra; and as summer sluggishly wanes toward autumn, the Arctic Gentians explode into bloom.
Their tubular flowers – sometimes ivory white, sometimes the white of old snow flushed with the faintest green, always sparingly striped inside with purple – make a celebration of tundra life.
Ground-huggers tucked between rocks and among grasses, the Gentians remain hidden from a passing car. Walk the tundra and the joy you feel at seeing the Arctic Gentians makes you a part of the glory.
The sound sifts through the air like light that leaves no shadow. Treeland, shrubland, grassland, neighborhood: it is everywhere.
A peeping, a cheeping: it has presence but no location.
The eyes search frantically but vainly for what the ears insist must be out there.
A squeaking, a squealing: its high-pitched quality suggests some insect call.
But the mind comprehends what the eyes cannot find and the ears cannot fathom. It is the tail end of the baby-bird season. Fledgling sparrows and pewees and chickadees are peeping their hunger to harried parents. Their feed-me pleas fill the closing days of August.
The flight across my yard was insectan but not dragonfly or butterfly, something more powerful. It demanded attention when it alighted.
Behold the mantid! Master of all it surveys!
Green to hide; wings to fly; legs to walk and stalk; eyes to see and find; pincers to grasp; jaws to shred and eat.
Behold the mantid! So many creatures have so much to fear from this mighty predator of meadow and yard, thicket and bough.
Behold the mantid!
It flew again but never alighted. Something deftly snatched it from the air.
Behold the Kestrel! Master of all it surveys!
On whispering wings Common Nighthawks whisk by, easily unnoticed, often mystifying.
They usually fly so high or roost so stoically that seeing them low to the ground makes them unfamiliar and almost startling; they seem like they should be something else.
Early to depart in late summer, Common Nighthawks migrate in flocks of dozens or hundreds, flying on overcast days, sweeping over treeless ridges like creeping fog.
This annual nighthawk passage is one of the great unheralded wildlife spectacles.
Should you find yourself among them as they pass, you will hear their whispering wingsong and in it sense an unsung elegance.
What orbs are these that glow in the night? Neither stars nor moons, these orbs shine with earthly light.
Faintly, so faintly, they hover in the distance, winking now on now off now on again.
Eyes. Capturing light from street lamps and porch fixtures, patio flames and car beams, the faintly glowing eyes come and go with a bit of blinking or turning of the head.
Round when seen singly but almond when seen together, they are eyes set on the sides of an animal’s head. Prey animal, not predator.
And with a wink, the unseen deer walks on.
Great blotches of yellow in the tree across the marsh look like clusters of autumn leaves, but the season of golden foliage is not yet here.
I watch awhile and see the blotches resolve into patches and spots; and steady watching reveals the spots move twig to twig, a skill no leaf ever mastered.
Not leaves or any other part of the tree, they are Yellow-headed Blackbirds roosting, thousands of them bringing motion and color and life to a long-dead Eastern Cottonwood.
From a distance they look right at home, as if they had grown in place on the twiggery.
The egg cocoon overwintered beneath my eave; the spiderlings hatched on a warm day in late spring. They mostly dispersed; one stayed.
An orb-weaver, she regularly spun new webs, her first about the size of circle formed when thumb and middle finger touch tips. It caught gnats and aphids.
Each new web got bigger and caught larger prey: midges, mosquitoes, caddisflies.
Last night, she filled the space between eave and fence with a great circular web. This morning, she dines upon damselfly.
Soon, she will leave her own egg cocoon in this place as five generations of orb-weaver before her have done.
A well-watered world looks different, smells different, sounds different, feels different.
Colorless of its own, summer rain imbues the land with verdancy.
Scentless by itself, summer rain humidifies the air that it might telegraph the aromas of leaf and soil, wood and fungus, blossom and insect.
Voiceless, summer rain thumps and patters and roars as it falls; but it also moistens the world so that breezes passing among leaves whisper more musically.
Together, these perceptions soften the world and thereby confer a sense that life is rich and healthy.
Summer rain graces us with a most remarkable feeling of well-being.
Clacking accents dry meadows everywhere. Percussive like castanets without the flamenco rhythm, the clacking is but half of a late-summer ritual.
Bouncing erratically on bright yellow or red wings, males of certain grasshoppers strut their stuff for females. Brightly colored wings to be seen and clacking call to be heard: it is the song-and-dance routine of their mating. Perpetuation depends on being found.
And so they clack.
They clack among yuccas of the plains, mountain-mahoganies of the foothills, pines of the mountains. Different places, different grasshoppers, same love song.
Clacking: a true, if diminutive, call of the wild.
The hike begins with no particular fungal expectations, but part way across the meadow a white mound bulging from the soil intrudes upon the eye as much as upon the land. It is a mushroom in its season.
Dozens more scatter among the Green Gentian and Silvery Lupine. Some big as melons, others small as oranges; each one holding a thousand spores for every tree in the forest, a hundred spores for every blade of grass in the meadow.
The Giant Western Puffball: to find one is to smile; to find a herd of them is to exclaim, "Great hike!"
Alpine Avens adorns the tundra much as Quaking Aspen does the mountain slopes below.
A mat-forming wildflower of the rose family, Alpine Avens grows abundantly but remains inconspicuous, its golden yellow flowers just another contribution of elegance to an already spectacular landscape bouquet.
But come late summer, when the blossoms are spent, Alpine Avens comes into its own. In great swaths and incidental patches it contributes a fabulous red to an otherwise fading landscape palette.
In the way it commands the tundra with a brilliant red worth traveling to see does the Alpine Avens match the splendor of the autumn Aspens.
On hot summer nights, lying in bed waiting for sleep to arrive, I hear through my open window a Plains Garter-Snake poking erratically among dead leaves in the flowerbeds where it hunts.
To the tutored ear the leaf-chatter is no music, but the crackling serenades me.
I hear in it childhood days spent chasing garter-snakes through vacant lots of tall grass, of catching them, of getting bitten by them, of keeping them caged, of catching grasshoppers to feed them...of turning them loose again.
And somewhere in the listening sleepiness passes to dreaminess, night passes to morning, and childhood passes...
Up where the sky is full of blue and the ground is full of rocks lives a no-nonsense artisan.
With nothing for a tail and legs too short to visibly separate paws from body, it neither plows nor plants yet it farms, employs neither machinery nor assembly line yet is industrious.
The Pika snips today the plants it will eat months from now. One mouthful at a time, it ceaselessly rearranges the hay that will sustain it through winter.
Thus citizen of agriculture, student of industry, the Pika, artisan of the high country, makes rock gardens of the talus.
Twilight gently prepares the Many-flowered Eveningstars for their big show. With velvet touch it escorts each bud into bloom; so when the moons of Jupiter twinkle into view, they have an audience of three-inch ivory-colored flowers.
But the Eveningstars ignore distant moons and spend the night basking in the attention of certain admirers.
White-lined Sphinx-Moths swarm the Eveningstar patches and spend the night wrestling the stiff nocturnal blossoms. It is a lover’s embrace: Sphinx-Moth gets nectar; Eveningstar gets pollen.
And tomorrow night, with twilight as valet and distant moons as audience, Sphinx-Moth and Eveningstar shall renew their tryst.
The heat of summer sings but with a borrowed song in another’s voice.
Late-summer morning grows with only the echo of bird chatter that filled early summer. As the dew fades, the song rises – a bit in this ash, one in that elm – as solitary troubadours prepare for a day of trying to out-perform each other. Their dissonant chorus finds its own charm.
The song climbs with the thermometer until the midday sky thrums with a pulsing drone.
The cicadas have finished their warmup.
In summer’s heat their nuptial song becomes the background cadence for the procession of life itself.
Little patches of soil scarcely larger than thumbnails rearrange themselves, twitching or heaving or scuttling an inch or two.
No lumps of soil, they are late-summer offspring of a Short Horned-Lizard.
Their variable scales of blotchy browns, grays, and tans match the coarse grit texture and color of the steppe soil where they live.
Such camouflage hides them from the hungry eyes of Swainson’s Hawks, Burrowing Owls, and Loggerhead Shrikes while their own hungry eyes search for grasshopper nymphs and ants.
For the lizardlings, to live is to eat without getting eaten; to survive is to see without being seen.
Midges swirling in an aerial dance would be invisible but for the hesperian sunlight that illuminates them from behind.
Into their midst zooms an agent of chaos many, many times larger than its insectan kin, a giant by comparison. On six-inch diaphanous wings that glow with the same ethereal light, it reveals its identity in the geometric zigging and zagging it performs through the hapless swarm.
This hungry dragonfly changes the midges’ flight from a dance to a life-and-death game of connect the dots...and the midges are the dots.
And that quickly, the dragonfly vanishes.
The midges dance on.
Perhaps it is the way bats negotiate darkness: fearlessly, confidently, successfully.
Perhaps it is the way craneflies flutter hopelessly against a window screen lighted from within.
Perhaps it is the way deer eyes capture every gleam and flicker of light and make it their own.
Perhaps it is the way my old dog – listening to the silence with dulled ears, looking at the darkness with dimmed eyes – takes the world’s measure.
Perhaps it is the way life continues but in a hush.
Whatever the impression, the conclusion is definite.
In late summer, nighttime is the best part of the day.
Perhaps it is the way cottontails just appear on the lawn as if materializing from the netherworld between light and shadow.
Perhaps it is the way fulgurant spider silk fills seeming emptiness with sparkles of hesperian sunlight.
Perhaps it is the way Western Wood-Pewees convert cottonwood groves to chapels by their somnolent vesper song.
Perhaps it is the way Woodhouse’s Toads lumber through the flowerbeds with surety of purpose despite their hop-and-stop progress.
Perhaps it is the way life gathers itself for rest.
Whatever the impression, the conclusion is definite.
In late summer, evening is the best part of the day.
Perhaps it is the way scampering Fox Squirrels make my fence their own trail through the neighborhood.
Perhaps it is the way fledgling Barn Swallows perch on the neighbor’s television antenna to wait for parents to bring them food.
Perhaps it is the way pome and legume have quietly replaced the flowers that bore them.
Perhaps it is the focused manner of bumblebees mining pollen from stiff thistle blossoms.
Perhaps it is merely the way individual living conveys a richness of being.
Whatever the impression, the conclusion is definite.
In late summer, midday is the best part of the day.
Perhaps it is the way the early Sun teases me awake by caressing my eyes with fresh new light.
Perhaps it is the way the American Goldfinches, House Finches, and Mourning Doves flood my window with song.
Perhaps it is the way dew bathes my bare feet.
Perhaps it is the way dawn foliage smells, making green the only hue to have its own fragrance.
Perhaps it is merely the way awakening bestows opportunity to engage life for yet another day.
Whatever the impression, the conclusion is definite.
In late summer, morning is the best part of the day.
Skunks teach us that we can smell a thing. Sagebrush shrublands demonstrate that we can smell a place. Cherry blossoms prove that we can smell a season.
Ah, but the gumweeds!
A group of sunflower species that favor sunny, dry soils, the gumweeds wait until late summer to blossom. Their heads exude a milky white resin that sticks fingers together and that pleases the nose with an aroma suggestive of eucalyptus.
Their stickiness passing in minutes, their fragrance in days, the gumweeds assert that time and place have collective aromatic identity.
Gumweeds are a phenomenon of thing, place, and season.
This morning begins more than a new day, for August spans more than a collection of days; it embodies a season unto itself.
August blooms with a profusion of sunflowers, dances with a wealth of butterflies.
August sings cheerfully with cheeps of baby birds begging for food each morning, sonorously with cicadas droning all day, wistfully with bats chittering through the night.
August celebrates another year of living by hosting the greatest multitude of life alive at any one time during any part of the year. For this, it stands alone.
Autumn. Winter. Spring. Summer. August.
And so the season begins.
