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The first hike of September
Sep. 1st, 2005 11:01 pmRaphael and I went out to Carver Park Reserve today. We got there around 4:30 (we are not early starters), and the light over the fields and fields of goldenrod was already taking on the richer golden colors of evening. As we turned into the park, Raphael noticed a maple that was already turning its color. Here and there were others, and a few sprays of sumac were already red.
We took our usual route, Maple Trail to the lake, backtracking over the Cattail Trail to the boardwalk over the marsh, then back to the Nature Center, through the butterfly garden, and along another trail I can't recall the name of, that overlooks a steep slope of flowers and is in turn overlooked by another one. At the bottom of the first slope is a pond of varying size and algae infestation. After that we went through the woods and up a steep hill and along a very slanty mown path and around and finally up again to the high prairie, whereupon we were so tired that we eschewed the other wetland with boardwalk and went through a short bit of high prairie to the road, and past the shorebird sanctuary, and through a space of more goldenrod and small juniper and ash and oak trees, past a lake, and another, and back to the car.
It was a sunny blue and gold day, but extremely windy; the weather service forecast gusts to 35 miles an hour, and I believe that. The constant push of the air altered the look of the landscape. I kept thinking, what kind of tree is that, and realizing when I got close to it that it was a maple or an oak with all its leaves blown back so that the paler undersides showed. Sumac was much affected, and half the water-lilies had half of each leaf standing up perpendicular to the water, reddish and oddly veined. The whole landscape looked like an excitable puppy with its ear turned inside out.
We didn't see as much life as we sometimes do. There were darners; I got a good look at one female green darner because she was flying against the wind just hard enough to hover right in front of me. Mostly it was a day of startling small life from underfoot. When we walked along the boardwalk over the marsh, damselflies and tiny speckled moths flung themselves out from under the edges of the boards, either landing on the wood itself for a brief moment or else fleeing over the water. Darners flew up out of the cattails. There were meadowhawks everywhere, especially anywhere there was an edge of any sort: between asphalt and mown grass, between short and longer mown grass, between mown and unmown grass, between shrub and grass, between wood and water, even between light and shadow, as we walked along the meadowhawks appeared, rising and falling and darting, their wings glittering and their straight bodies darning the air.
As we moved from the slope of flowers, where we saw the first of the blue wood asters and the first of the tiny foamy white asters, along with yellow and gray coneflower and goldenrod, we passed through the shade of some big buckthorn bushes and some small trees, and all around us there rose up a cloud of monarch butterflies, a dozen or more. As we went on a few more floated up from the undergrowth, and then one, and then no more.
A large and a small wedge of geese, a handful of swallows, and a tiny bird like a hummingbird on steroids, yet arrested in motion, gleaning berries out of a dogwood bush, were almost all the other life there was. We did hear a lot of chickadee conversation, particularly the alleged "chicka-dee-dee-dee," which always sounds much more like cackling laughter to me. Raphael agreed, saying that chickadees were almost as amused as corvids.
We ran some errands on the way home. As we got into the car in the vast parking lot of PetSmart, I looked at the western sky, as I had been doing repeatedly since the sun set; and there were Venus and Jupiter, heading for their own setting in the pale orange western sky.
P.
We took our usual route, Maple Trail to the lake, backtracking over the Cattail Trail to the boardwalk over the marsh, then back to the Nature Center, through the butterfly garden, and along another trail I can't recall the name of, that overlooks a steep slope of flowers and is in turn overlooked by another one. At the bottom of the first slope is a pond of varying size and algae infestation. After that we went through the woods and up a steep hill and along a very slanty mown path and around and finally up again to the high prairie, whereupon we were so tired that we eschewed the other wetland with boardwalk and went through a short bit of high prairie to the road, and past the shorebird sanctuary, and through a space of more goldenrod and small juniper and ash and oak trees, past a lake, and another, and back to the car.
It was a sunny blue and gold day, but extremely windy; the weather service forecast gusts to 35 miles an hour, and I believe that. The constant push of the air altered the look of the landscape. I kept thinking, what kind of tree is that, and realizing when I got close to it that it was a maple or an oak with all its leaves blown back so that the paler undersides showed. Sumac was much affected, and half the water-lilies had half of each leaf standing up perpendicular to the water, reddish and oddly veined. The whole landscape looked like an excitable puppy with its ear turned inside out.
We didn't see as much life as we sometimes do. There were darners; I got a good look at one female green darner because she was flying against the wind just hard enough to hover right in front of me. Mostly it was a day of startling small life from underfoot. When we walked along the boardwalk over the marsh, damselflies and tiny speckled moths flung themselves out from under the edges of the boards, either landing on the wood itself for a brief moment or else fleeing over the water. Darners flew up out of the cattails. There were meadowhawks everywhere, especially anywhere there was an edge of any sort: between asphalt and mown grass, between short and longer mown grass, between mown and unmown grass, between shrub and grass, between wood and water, even between light and shadow, as we walked along the meadowhawks appeared, rising and falling and darting, their wings glittering and their straight bodies darning the air.
As we moved from the slope of flowers, where we saw the first of the blue wood asters and the first of the tiny foamy white asters, along with yellow and gray coneflower and goldenrod, we passed through the shade of some big buckthorn bushes and some small trees, and all around us there rose up a cloud of monarch butterflies, a dozen or more. As we went on a few more floated up from the undergrowth, and then one, and then no more.
A large and a small wedge of geese, a handful of swallows, and a tiny bird like a hummingbird on steroids, yet arrested in motion, gleaning berries out of a dogwood bush, were almost all the other life there was. We did hear a lot of chickadee conversation, particularly the alleged "chicka-dee-dee-dee," which always sounds much more like cackling laughter to me. Raphael agreed, saying that chickadees were almost as amused as corvids.
We ran some errands on the way home. As we got into the car in the vast parking lot of PetSmart, I looked at the western sky, as I had been doing repeatedly since the sun set; and there were Venus and Jupiter, heading for their own setting in the pale orange western sky.
P.
