Naturalist heads into the woods to search for hope
Opening up the Weather Channel website on my laptop is usually the first thing I do every morning—OK, truth in journalism, there’s always something else, but checking the WC is typically the first work-related task of the day—and in the middle of late week, I was dismayed to discover that my go-to source of rock-solid meteorological edification was doing something unprofessional. With reckless abandon, the Channel, for the local forecast in our area, was dropping the F-bomb.
Egged on by the prognostication persuasions of the National Weather Service, I was exposed to a near-constant barrage of
F-words. This was shocking. Responsible journalists are counseled, and, on the electronic side of the profession, mandated by federal authorities, to avoid using such language, which, I hope, has never appeared in this column.
But there are F-bombs, and there are f-bombs, and this particular variation on the old theme did not, I have to admit, appear on comedian George Carlin’s famous 1972 list of terminology judged verboten to utter on television and radio broadcasts. Nevertheless, the F-words I encountered formed a linked pair that was guaranteed to engender a combination of disgust, despair, and near-terminal depression— the very things that the authorities were trying to protect us from and should have warranted inclusion in an updated “These Are Not Protected by the First Amendment” federal registry.
The words, of course, are these: “Freeze Warning.”
In the earlier days of the Journal, I would draw ire or something a little stronger, say, homicidal rage, from my editors when I would, well, gush, about the joys of observing and photographing the silver-edged sword of autumn’s first killing frost. Members of various editorial staffs who were forever humming the theme song of the surfing movie, The Endless Summer, had to be restrained from grabbing that sword and turning it on the Naturalist, In time, your faithful documentarian learned how to curb his enthusiasm for one of the signature events in autumn’s phenology and remain in the good graces of his overseers.
But even this diehard partisan of winter weather has, by now, stopped wishing for any second... or third... or beyond... return act of the cold. The wood pile’s running on empty, and it’s time to clean the chimney for the last time this season and start working on cutting and splitting for next year. I’ve brewed up nectar for the Ruby-throated hummingbirds, filled up their feeder, and gone into vigil mode to await their arrival. (The first male of the season stopped by on April 25th.) The Hay-scented fern fiddleheads have already unrolled, the cinnamon ferns are fast following suit, and the Maidenhair ferns, which are one of the last to emerge, are now in debut stage. If you know where to look, which in my case is at the streamside gardens of a friend who lives nearby, the woods are alive with the lovely sunshine flowers of Wood poppies, along with red trilliums and Trout lilies, the latter of which get their common name from the fact that they bloom in the beginning of trout season and have ephemeral leaves that resemble the speckle pattern found on a trout’s back. On the ridge, I’m being graced with an abundance of Early Saxifrage, a.k.a., Virginia rockbreakers, and the first blooms of Spring beauties, and while the green curtain is beginning to descend from the hardwood branches, the incipient leaves remain too small to obscure the presence of Yellow warblers and other colorful songbirds that are moving back into the area, either for a brief refueling visit before continuing their journey to the Great North Woods, or finding suitable real estate for home-with-anursery building.
Freeze warnings? Oy, we’re moving into May, Bring on the wild columbines, the Dwarf ginseng, the Canada mayflowers, and the Mayapples. Let there be Strawberry-Rhubarb double crisps, from local sources, coming out of the oven. (And in our case, let us have an oven to replace the one that turned out to be unrepairable,)
Please, please, please, arrest anyone intoning the F-word.
For its part, the natural world greeted the warning with a proverbial cold shoulder and a shrug. Under the eye of the just-pastfull Pink Moon, which gets its name not from the hue of the lunar disk—it rises golden, not pink—but rather from the blossom color of a native species of April-blooming phlox known as “moss pink,” the temperature dropped below the freezing mark. In concert, out came the dire admonitions. Bring in the tender plants. Restart the wood stoves. Don’t venture forth in bikinis and Speedos.
At my advanced age, Warning Number Three was hardly necessary. The second admonition was still being followed, however grudgingly. And as to the first, I dutifully obeyed, thereby saving my wintered-over house vegetation from insult and injury.
But I didn’t worry too much about the rest of the greening and growing natural world. It wasn’t going to get that cold, and there was certainly nothing in the forecast that would have rivaled the climate disaster wrought by the deep freeze in mid-May that cost many a farmer the year’s apple crop, when mid-20s temperatures settled in just as the apple trees were blooming.
The natives have been built by evolution to handle the inevitable light frosts that torment, but do not damage, observers and the observed alike. Within several hours of daybreak, the temperature had rocketed upward from about 30 degrees towards the 60s. The bumblebees moved back from hiding places into foraging mode, as the flowers felt the growing warmth and responded with open petals for the pollinators. The woods and fields returned to the business of greening, and the cold did nothing whatsoever to discourage the aggressively malevolent tendencies of the invasive species on the ridge and beyond. The multiflora roses put forth an abundance of leaves. The Japanese Knotweed emerged from the ground intent on overwhelming the environment. Garlic mustard poisoned the ground it had claimed for itself, thus preventing most other species of taking back territory. And the celandines, both Greater and Lesser, continued to outcompete any plant that tried to get in their way.
Onto this botanical battleground, a few butterflies, largely American ladies, took advantage of the nectar largesse, and in the gathering warmth, the Ruby-throats, which had survived the chill by entering an energy-saving state known as torpor—a condition not unknown to the Naturalist—stopped by the feeder for a quick fill-up in between searches for the first columbines and other sources of sugary calories.
I eyed the forecast and, with more F-bombs in the offing, kept the home fires burning, the long underwear on, and the tender plants indoors. The hummingbirds, after all, had a Plan B, a strategy to mine the bullet holes excavated in the sap-bearing bark of maples, birches, and apple trees by Yellow-bellied sapsuckers for nourishment in case the flowers left the birds wanting for nutrition. I pulled out the chain saw and the maul, invoked my own set of F-word annoyed oaths—but not in print... never in print—and got down to my own Plan B business of staying warm. Soon enough, perhaps, the natural climate would help out.