Red Hawk Rustic

The other week I went for a walk in the woods and met Winter in one of her lovelier moods.  There was still snow on the ground and it was cold, but not piercing.  The air felt fresh and moist and was a pleasure to inhale.  It was morning, before 9 o'clock and the sky was pastel blue, pink, and yellow--it glowed from the inside like mother-of-pearl, or an opal.  It had that special luminescence that I love and  see only in winter. 

I walked all the way through the back pasture and up through the woods trail to sit on the porch swing that John put up between two trees.  The swing looks out over one of my favorite section of woods, what I call the Beech Tree Forest, even though there aren't really a whole lot of beech trees.  I like it there because the forest floor is relatively free of multi-flora rose and some of the trees are large.  They create a true canopy and the sunlight filters through, church-like in the summer.  There are some young beech trees in the understory and in winter, their silver bark and their creamy yellow leaves still clinging to the branches stand out in graceful relief against the black trunks of the other trees, and, on my particular morning, snow.

Like dogwoods in spring, beech trees in winter always remind me of lace.  I guess that's a bit cliched and I should come up with a better metaphor, but it jumps to mind, I can't help it.  It has to do with the way their branches grow horizontally, snaking out to capture what light they can under the bigger trees once summer gets underway.  The white dogwood blossoms and the pretty yellow beech leaves look like they've been threaded through a tapestry in an almost even line.  It's lovely, dainty. 

Beeches grow all big and muscular of course, while dogwoods remain demure.  I like the mature beeches, too.  They remind me of people more than any other tree in the forest.  Their bark is smooth, like skin, and it wrinkles like skin around the joints of their branches.  Whenever I come across a grove of full grown beeches, I become a little self-conscious, like they're watching me, and perhaps judging.  I'm worried I'll get smacked like Dorothy did by the apple trees in the Wizard of Oz.

Research into why beech trees (and oaks) hold onto their dead leaves ( a phenomena called marcescence) until the new growth in spring pushes them off led me to this answer:  No one knows.  There are guesses, of course.  Perhaps it helps them retain water throughout winter (but this doesn't make any sense to me, since trees lose water through the stomata, little pores, on their leaves).  Or maybe they are still getting some nutrients from the leaves (which also seems suspect since all the chlorophyll is gone and what's left are the chemical wastes from metabolism).  Or maybe it keeps deer from eating the bark since there are dead, crunchy leaves in the way (hmmm...seems to me that would not deter the eating machines I know as deer).  The best answer I found was that maybe it doesn't do them any good at all anymore.  Maybe it is a remnant from earlier in their evolution, something like an appendix.

I found that answer in a delightful article about the beech tree here by George Ellison.  He found a quote by naturalist Donald Culross Peattie that I would have thought came straight out of the 19th century, given the romantic tone of the prose.  This is the kind of stuff I eat right up...

“A beech is, in almost any landscape where it appears, the finest tree to be seen ... Far down the aisles of the forest the beech is identifiable by the gleam of its wondrously smooth bark, not furrowed even by extreme old age ... The elegant clear gray of the bark extends from the trunk to the main mighty boughs so that when the tree stands naked in winter it seems to shine through the forest ... As the foliage matures in autumn [its] delicate leaves . . . turn a soft clear yellow. Then is the beech translated. As the sun of Indian summer bathes the great tree, it stands in a profound autumnal calm, enveloped in a golden light that hallows all about it.”
— Donald Culross Peattie, “A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America” (1950)

Well.  So much for lace!  Have a great weekend.

"What colors do you see out there, Maria?"

"Blue.  And white."

The reflection you see in the photo above is my granddaughter, Maria, sitting at the kitchen table last week while the two of us were eating breakfast.  I was about to tell her what I saw out the windows when I stopped myself and asked her instead what she saw.  Ends up we agreed on the colors.  I might have said only blue---endless gradations of blue.  And later, when the sun "came up" (whatever that means these days), I might have said only white---endless gradations of white. 

And that sad fact has me kinda blue. 

Where, oh where, has all the sunshine gone? 

I know this happens every winter.  I know that everyone else is going through it, too.  Or, at least those who live in places where winter is cold and dark. 

All I can say is, sorry.  This is where the "mostly regular" part of the "mostly regular dispatches from Red Hawk Farm" comes into play.  Y'all do not want or need to hear another person describe how cold and dark and blue winter can be.  Subscribe to the RSS Feed on this page (the icon should be lit up on your toolbar) and add it to your list of feeds if you like.  Then you can simply roll your cursor over the link in your feed list to see if anything besides frozen fingers and grey skies have graced these pages lately.

Stay as warm as you can, inside and out.  I'm trying to do the same!

On this cool, grey Thursday with rain spitting at the windows, I thought I would share some pictures of the fun things that happened this past summer while I was on break from blogging.  No one was eating bon bons...

I found a baby box turtle on the path to the barn.  A babybox turtle!  He/she was so cute and unafraid even as John put his big ole' mug right up next to him.  The turtles around here must have a fearless gene, because I found a full grown one in what I call the blackberry patch--a field near the road that I ride in. I spotted it from atop Savvy's back, which is no mean feat given how tall Savvy is.  I hopped down to move the turtle out of harm's way and I held it up for Savvy to investigate.  Savvy stuck his neck out and snorted long and hard several times at the strange creature.  The turtle didn't duck his head in at all.  He acted like horses snorted at him like that all day long. 

 

I also found, for the first time, monarch caterpillars.  I was so excited to finally see evidence of their life stages.  I see the adults all the time, but I have searched in vain for the larval and chrysalis stage.  I think I was looking on the wrong kind of milkweed.  We have several species of it growing on the farm and I was looking on Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca.  I actually found one on what I call Butterfly Weed, Asclepias tuberosa, that I had picked and put in a bouquet on the kitchen table.  I was eating lunch one day and about dropped my spoon when I saw this guy munching happily on the flowers (not the leaves as I would have thought.)...

Next year, I would like to find a chrysalis.  It shouldn't be that hard, but I'll have to work at it systematically, I think.

And then there was the garden.  Remember that?  It turned out to be pretty prolific despite the fact that I threw some seeds in the ground and then neglected it for the horses all summer.  We had green beans, beets, zucchini, tomatoes, sage, basil and dill along with a variety of flowers.  I tried fennel, but you really do need to mound the dirt around the base or you just get stalk.  I have a lot of stalk.  Just think, though, what could happen next year with someone actually tending this little plot!

Our little baby grandchildren came out several times.  Mario likes to find sticks in the woods.

 And Maria makes her fashion statements.

And we had a rainbow--a double rainbow actually, though you can barely see it in this picture.  John and I were walking back to the house from the barn after a rain shower and arcing over the woods to the east was a perfect, double rainbow.  It was probably the biggest I have ever seen.  I needed a wide angle lens and some fancy filters to capture the full glory, but you get the idea. 

Here's to Summer's pot of gold!

My Ecological Calendar calls October, November and December, Leave, Shadow and Ember.

We are in the month of Leave. 

~

Leaves from walnut trees skitter to the ground when the breeze blows hard.  It is the first little sign that something is different.  The Spirits of Summer, bent on pleasure, enjoying the bacchanalian rush of the September garden and green and forest deep, hush their party for a second.  “What was that?  Did someone knock?”   There are small changes in the slant of sunlight, and a cooler, drier wind from the northwest taps their shoulders then moves away like a teasing uncle before they turn.  A wave of melancholy blooms in their hearts and their sly smiles and their hands, busy eating and drinking and playing, droop for a moment.  The wheel is ready to turn again.  The time is not far away when underground they’ll go, into a long sleep, frozen and dark.

~

At a gas station off the highway the other evening, I saw a flock of starlings rise up in an organic wave against the sky.  They blossomed like a colony of algae, spreading in a widening circle, then collapsed into a horizontal bar, speeding across the sky.  They lifted again, putting a little distance between themselves, and the black opened up into gray.  They were joined by another flock from the north and became impossibly large.  How many were there?  A thousand?  Three thousand?  Half a million?  They wheeled and dove, spread thin, then concentrated into a dense mass.  They spun into separate groups, turned, and flew into each other like a massive drill team.  No individual ever broke rank.  No collisions ever occurred.  They were a balloon tossing on the breeze.  They were a finely tuned machine whirring with precision gears.  Exuberant freedom and rank and file conformity contained all in one gesture.  It was hypnotic like the sea, an ebb and flow of waves in the sky.   I looked around.  No one else was watching the birds.  John was inside, paying for the gas.  By the time he came out, the birds had dissipated.

“You know they’ve come up with a computer model that simulates the movement of large flocks of birds,” he said when I told him what he’d missed.  “They” is actually Craig Reynolds, a computer animator who wanted to solve the problem of depicting the movement of flocks for animated films.  He developed a simple algorithm where individuals follow three rules: separation, alignment, and cohesion.  In other words: Don’t crowd your neighbor, head in the same general direction as your neighbor, and move towards the general position of your neighbor.  “Complex global behavior can arise from the interaction of simple local rules.” If everyone does it, it works.  This kind of behavior is called “emergent” and because it depends on every individual following all the rules, it exists “at the edge of chaos.”   If one individual breaks rank, the whole thing collapses like a row of dominoes.  

Craig Reynolds doesn’t make the claim that real birds follow these rules.  His algorithm makes computer objects move in a lifelike way.  Biologists, systems scientists, and evolutionary theorists have extrapolated, though, and learned a good deal about how nature works.  The lines between artificial life and real life blur.

A flock of starlings is called a murmuration.  I suppose the name comes from the murmur of sound that is created as their cheetering calls move up and down, nearer and farther away with their motion in the sky.  Sitting in the car, I couldn’t hear them, but the melancholy music in the last stanza of the John Keats poem, “To Autumn,” melted into my heart. 

 

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn,

Hedge crickets sing, and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

~

The leaves of the giant blue hosta flutter on a windless day, then stop.  A small gray form has scuttled under the ovate leaves.  It is cool and damp under the canopy of the arching plant, but no one is resting.  The party is over.  The Spirits of Summer are packing up their bags with extra clothes and food stores.  They move in small groups, or alone, with handkerchief sacks tied onto sticks slung over their shoulders.  They call now and then to each other, and tearful goodbyes happen in the middle of the paths, but mostly everyone is too busy to talk.  They step around foxglove goblets and liatrus swizzle sticks—party debris rotting away on the ground. The departure will take some weeks to complete, so crowded was the garden.  Here and there a band of revelers still dance and sing and tip their cups.  But their clothes are tattered and when night comes with its chill breath, some are caught unaware and perish in their crumpled finery.  A band of Winter Sprites sit on the gathering clouds and watch the procession with sky blue eyes that glint in the changing light of the sun.  They will cast their Shadow soon and we will huddle around the Embers of our dying year.