If summer were a weeklong vacation, mid-August would be Friday afternoon. You’re not packing your bags to come home yet, but there’s an awareness that there’s more behind you than in front of you. You start to get reflective, feeling good about the projects got done, concerned about the ones you didn’t. The little projects get hurried, which is to say that you start to chase them like a cat chases a moth.
As always, this sense of passing time is reflected in nature – She never lets us forget. Melodious bird song is being replaced by mechanical bug song as the insects take center stage. Strawberry to thimbleberry. Blueberry to hazelnut. There’s sweet corn on the kitchen table and the dairy farmers have two cuts in the barn.
It has certainly been an interesting summer weather wise. In Vermont, we whiplashed from a dry early spring to a sopping wet early summer. Rainfall totals in Burlington in June came within 0.07 inches of an all-time record; July precipitation was 6 inches above normal. It’s probably a safe bet that all this water will affect the trees in some way – the Vermont Department of Forests and Parks is reporting that some trees and plants are showing signs of leaf scorch after being saturated and then exposed to very hot, sunny weather; that trees in very wet and flooded sites are showing early color; and that premature leaf drop on serviceberries may be attributed to the extended wet spell. But trees are resilient and, if given a choice, I suspect they’d choose too much rain over too little.
Early July was stupidly hot– only the 13th time in recorded history that we had five straight days of 90-degree heat – and would have been an all-time record breaker, were it not for the jag of cool weather at the very end. The cool served to repair all of our nerves and reinforce the idea that autumn is just around the corner; it was no coincidence that the first morning I had to put on a flannel shirt was also the first morning I noticed how much light we’d lost since the solstice in June.
The fall issue of Northern Woodlands – as reliable a phenological event as there is – is in the final stages of design. In it we have a detective story by our former editor and publisher Stephen Long, who looks for signs of the fabled Hurricane of ’38 on his woodlot. Liz Farnsworth, the co-author of A Field Guide to the Ants of New England (a fabulous book if you don’t have it), profiles the bugs you might find in your firewood. Tovar Cerulli has written an exhaustively researched piece on fish and wildlife funding that will help you understand the debates around this subject. And Susan Morse walks us through the act of a buck scrape, complete with beautiful pictures worthy of the wall in deer camp. All this, along with pieces on red oak, Russian olive pie, migrating hawks, fir blisters, trout spots, secondary wood manufacturing, and probably a half dozen other subjects I’m forgetting, will show up in your mailbox a few short weeks from today.
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