Under the brighter and larger-than-usual eye of the super, seasonal blue, and Sturgeon moon—the rare combination of characteristics of August’s full moon last week—I was having a conversation with a Barred Owl. I couldn’t see the remarkably keen-eyed predator, who was just out of my visual range in the deep and still-dark woods, but I’m sure the owl had no trouble whatsoever seeing me. The bird certainly could pinpoint my presence with a sense of hearing so acute that it could essentially “see” in complete darkness.
It would give a single, sharp, descending hoot, and I’d answer with the full, “Who hoots for you?” response. This went on for a while, a deeply, soul-satisfying while (for me, at least; I can’t speak for the spirit of that spectral Strix varia). As we traded the equivalence of over-the-fence gossip in the recently chilled air, I wondered if it saw the closer-than-usual, third of four full moons in a season — there are typically three, hence the “blue” designation — and fish namesake as anything out of the ordinary.
.. or simply as an astronomical and Native American amalgam of traits that might make its hunting life a bit more convenient, just as September’s harvest moon, which will also bear the super title, used to aid farmers, by extending the hours of daylight in the era before artificial illumination, in bringing in the sheaves, along with the silage corn and the rest of the produce.
All I could know for certain was there was a genuine owl out there in the shadows, and I was not trading hoots with a nearby neighbor, as happened a couple of decades ago when we learned the true origins of what had become nightly strigiformidisms artfully dispensed and answered into the night. I suspect the local owls are still amused by that story. “And they thought they were actually talking to us.
.. what fools these mortals be!” After a dozen or so calls and responses, the Barred flew silently away and left me to the chorus of katydids and crickets, but after last week’s storms had been push aside by cold fronts and there was a pre-autumn chill in the air, the insects were not singing with quite the gusto I’d heard during the Dog Days and Nights of earlier August.
As I listened and heard definitely less, I noticed another kind of evening company. Watching me from a perch atop the basement door was a young Gray Tree Frog, perhaps a graduate of the amphibian Class of 2024. The batrachian was about the size of my thumb, and it was nestled in the drip cap from which it could look out at the world.
Unlike the intensely loud trills it and its male compatriots made last May and June during the courtship season, the frog was completely silent. It also wasn’t bothered in the least when I brought a stepladder outside, rigged up the appropriate camera lights, and proceeded to star the cooperative critter in a Journal photo shoot. Maybe the GTF was just too cool, literally and figuratively, to move.
Of course it’s too soon to view the frog’s appearance as a sign of the passage of time and the advent of the “F” word, but even the most fall-phobic folks can’t deny that the season is turning. There are simply too many indicators afoot and aloft to ignore. For starters, there’s the recent chilly weather, with temperatures falling below 50 and the need to put on a long-sleeve shirt after, and even somewhat before, sunset.
The fabulous American Flamingo that graced the Briggs Marsh in Little Compton earlier this month, much to the delight of a birding multitude, has departed, hopefully for appropriate headquarters much to the south, and left us now to sustain our passion with observations of more typical migratory fare, from a recent Hudsonian Godwit shorebird working the parking lot puddle at Misquamicut State Beach to a spate of still mostly colorful warblers carried down from the boreal forest nurseries by weather fronts. In this, the transition season, one should never venture forth without binoculars and a magnifying loupe, the appropriate telephoto and macro lenses, the Merlin bird-finding app on the smartphone, and the right combination of field guides in the backpack. There may not be even a hint of change in the hardwood leaves, but there is plenty of color in the August and September wildflowers—and plenty of colorful invertebrate visitors to spectacular blossoms newly open for business.
I’ve talked about Ironweed, Boneset, Sneezeweed, and Joe Pye Weed in recent editions of the Journal, and in many of the meadows I frequent, these charmers are continuing to put on a show, much to the delight of local butterflies, bees, wasps, the striking orange Oleander aphids and their herders and tenders, also known as ants, and an abundance of human observers. On a couple of tune-up trips to the Stonington Land Trust’s Thomas Miner preserve in preparation for last weekend’s annual public field trip, I was heartened by spotting more Monarch butterflies than I’d seen in years, and they were too busy courting and affixing fertilized eggs to young milkweed leaves to pay any attention to this documentarian, so I procured a generous number of nice close-up shots. The same was true of the Great Spangled fritillaries, the Black and the Tiger swallowtails, as well as with the Silver-spotted and other skipper species, along with several hairstreaks and blues.
The lepidopterans left me soul-satisfied. And the show’s about to get even better. The Purple-top and other incipient autumn grasses are beginning to make their wind-pollinated presences felt in treasured, unmowed places, and the wood asters, wild lettuces, hawkweeds, and Virgin’s Bower clematis blooms are lording it over the edges of fields and roads.
The meadows are going gold as the Solidago congregation comes into its own. Everyone knows this last group of plants as Goldenrod, and no one is neutral about a diverse plant genus whose Latin name means, approximately, to “become whole.” This is a reference to Solidago’s supposed efficacy in healing just about anything that could ail a human: the common cold, gastrointestinal and urinary troubles, intestinal worms, skin maladies, wounds, yeast infections, and even cancer.
Then, too, goldenrod is also blamed for hayfever, but this turns out to be an unfair accusation, since the bane of many a sufferer’s late summer existence is caused by ragweed pollen, which is light and wind-borne, rather than goldenrod pollen, which is clumping and too heavy to infiltrate human nostrils. So go for the gold without fear. Certainly you’ll have company, as goldenrod—there are more than two dozen different species in our area, and many are a challenge to identify—is a magnet to a bewildering variety of equally colorful pollinators, from flower flies to locust-borer beetles, carpenter bees to Ailanthus webworm moths.
Lurking in the leaves might be the breathtakingly beautiful caterpillar of the Brown-hooded Owlet moth or a ferocious Praying Mantis patiently awaiting dinner in the form of an unwitting victim. I hope it doesn’t dine on the Spring peepers or Gray tree frogs I’ve seen resting on goldenrod and other plant leaves as the amphibians attempt to navigate the gauntlet between their wetland nurseries and upland refuges. I hope my next Barred Owl conversation doesn’t include batrachian condolences.
Bruce Fellman is an environmental photojournalist and educator who lives in North Stonington. He has been writing about the natural world for for nearly 50 years. You may reach him at fellnature@sbcglobal.
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