Now when the nights are cool and the moon is dark, those giant puffball mushrooms swell in the woods, getting so big...
September fogs, the sliding sun, and one of the most radical weather shifts so far in the season, calls them up from the ground.
As the day moves to within a few degrees of equinox, other creatures tell the time as well as puffballs.
The rich scent of late summer pollen is almost gone by end of the week, replaced by the bittersweet odor of fallen apples and leaves. Cicadas are dying. Bees are awkward and stiff in the cool mornings. Sometimes on sunny days woolly bear caterpillars swarm across the roads. Kingbirds, finches, ruddy ducks, herring gulls and yellow-bellied sapsuckers move south. The last young grackles leave their nests.
Most berries are gone from the wild cherry when puffball mushrooms grow in the dark. The fat osage fruits are falling. Berries are red on the silver olives, orange on the American mountain ash, purple on the pokeweed. The domestic plants of local ponds are shriveling: the water lettuce, hyacinth and pickerel. The green frogs are finally silent.
Squirrels are shredding Osage fruits in the woods. Rose of Sharon, which was bright from Missouri to Connecticut a few weeks ago, has suddenly lost most of its flowers. Japanese knotweed blossoms darken and fall. False boneset begins to lose its brightness along the freeways.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of early fall. In the meantime, pay attention to just one of the pieces of early fall. Then you’ll know that Puffball mushrooms are puffing in the night.
