It is the last week of late summer. Toads and frogs have begun migration. You may see them hopping through your grass or across your walkway. Showers of apple leaves, locust leaves, black walnut, hackberry leaves come down in the windier afternoons. All the peaches are ripe. Yellow jackets seek the windfalls.
The chiggers have gone for the year, so have the fireflies. Goldenrod is turning. Once in a while a monarch butterfly defies the environmental odds, flies past you south. Streaks of gold appear on the silver olives.
Murmurations of starlings – those dramatic, acrobatic flocks - swoop back and forth across the sky. More regimented and seeming less spontaneous, long lines of blackbirds pass overhead. In the honeysuckles, robins peep their migration calls, gathering the flocks together for October’s departure south.
The soybean fields that were forest green from the Mississippi to New York are turning now, pacing the first turning of the cottonwoods and box elders and buckeyes to turn.
Autumn croci flower in the garden. Small white asters and the purple New England asters and giant golden Jerusalem artichokes bloom in the waysides. Bumblebees are old, clumsy in the cool mornings, get tired and sleep in the zinnias and the stonecrop. Chillier days silence the cicadas, slow the crickets and the katydids. In the woods, fawns have lost their spots. August’s ragweed finally goes to seed. Fog settles in the valleys before dawn.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the first week of early fall. In the meantime, watch and listen. There is so much more to hear and see.
