Arboretum Diary

"By September, the day breaks with little help from birds. A song sparrow may give a single half-hearted song, a woodcock may twitter overhead en route to his daytime thicket...but few other birds have anything to say or sing about."  – Sand County Almanac, "September"








8/31

We spend the frigid deep months of February through March waiting for the silent coliseum of air to thrive again with song.  The first days of raw spring, when the sun sets out patches of warmth in among the new forming buds and the last of the snow has receded into memory, the blast of song

comes from every direction – the backyard house swallows duck and weave across the panorama chasing crows in their own slooping gate back up into the castles of oaks where they belong.  If lucky, bluebirds nest and chirp somewhere close enough to consider behavior; hawks, above it all, circle in secret societies waiting for the field mouse to forget his place in the tunneled holes.  And then, before we can quite catch the days back in our fists, the songs thin out and the last of the lush green limbs replace them as they catch the fall wind.  Before the changing colors, the Arboretum is just that for now;

two bluejays flit about under the canopy of crabapple and the turkeys shyly shuffle about, but here in late summer it is the lush of the last of the green not the songbirds that dominate.  Longinecker Woods is

a well maintained field of tagged species, each tree, shrub, lilac, given its exclusive little piece of earth, which the mosquitos have come to be spoiled by as any child in the candy aisle.  In a month, the first of the sunburst colors will take hold in the canopies, the mosquitos, all thankful, retreating back to some elm stump den, and only the silent hawk will still set out the contours of the upward reaches of the sky.