© 2024 WYSO
Our Community. Our Nation. Our World.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Poor Will's Almanack: November 11 - 17, 2014

Martin LaBar
/
Flickr Creative Commons

While the moon darkens, turning from gibbous to crescent throughout the week, entering its fourth quarter on November 14th, it shadows Jupiter the morning star and takes down the last of the ginkgoes and the white mulberries and the silver maples. It colors the beeches and oaks and zelcovas and decorative pears with rust and gold, hurries the frogs and toads to reach their winter havens, silences the latest crickets of the year.

The sun moves east and south past the red supergiant, Antares, the cornerstone of Scorpio, toward the scorpion’s stinging tail, which once was the death of Orion, and approaches Sagittarius, the first sign of the new natural year and the farthest fall of the solar declination toward the horizon.

Signs of approaching cold as well as foretaste of spring, now the cacti of Christmas are opening, pampered jade trees and orchids – even away from their tropical habitat – obey the sun and come to bloom. The yellow blossoms of the witch hazel mimic the forsythia of April, and the berries of the bittersweet and winterberry vines break from their hulls to feed the new migrant juncos and to plant for May. Craneflies, the mosquito-like insects of cold and sun, spin through the mornings, impervious to the worst of the weather to come. On the warmest afternoons, the last and most reckless cabbage butterfly foretells the first warm day of March.

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of late fall and the first week of the Sandhill Crane Migration Moon, the very first week of the sun in cold Sagittarius. In the meantime, even as the leaves come down, be on the lookout for spring.

Poor Will’s Almanack for 2015 is now available. For a sample of this new annual, and for information on how to order your copies, visit www.poorwillsalmanack.com.

A note about Poor Will’s Almanack: starting next week, the segment will play at a slightly different time in the mornings: 6:45am and 8:45am, about ten minutes later. That shift in times is a result of NPR making changes to the national schedule for Morning Edition.

Stay Connected
Bill Felker has been writing nature columns and almanacs for regional and national publications since 1984. His Poor Will’s Almanack has appeared as an annual publication since 2003. His organization of weather patterns and phenology (what happens when in nature) offers a unique structure for understanding the repeating rhythms of the year.