That time of year to give your chicken coops a thorough spring cleaning

It is Nature’s rutting season. Even as the birds sing tumultuously and glance by with fresh and brilliant plumage, so now is Nature’s grandest voice heard and her sharpest flashes seen. The air has resumed its voice, and the lightening, like a yellow spring flower, illumines the dark banks of the clouds. All the pregnant earth is bursting into life, like a mildew, accompanied with noise and fire and tumult. She comes dripping rain like a cow with overflowing udder.

— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, May 20, 1856

The moon and sun and stars The third week of late spring

The Warbler Migration Moon waxes full at 11:14 p.m. on Sunday, and a total eclipse of the moon will take place late that evening. Lunar perigee, when the moon is closest to Earth, occurs at 10 a.m. on May 17. Rising late in the day and setting before dawn, the moon passes overhead in the night, making that time the most favorable for scouting for game and fishing.

The Sun enters Gemini on May 20, reaching about 85% of its solstice declination, at which point sunrise and sunset are only about a quarter of an hour each from their earliest and latest times.

By this time in May, Cassiopeia has moved deep into the northern night sky behind Polaris and Cepheus, which looks a little like a house lying on its side, is beginning to come around to the east of Polaris. When Cepheus is due east of the North Star, then it will be the middle of July. When it lies due south of Polaris, then the leaves will be turning. When it lies due west of Polaris, winter will have arrived.

Weather trends

This week’s weather is likely to be strongly influenced by full moon on the 15th, so close to lunar perigee on the 17th. Expect changeable conditions and be prepared to protect newly planted vegetables and flowers from light frost. Have extra seeds on hand in the event the rain washes out earlier plantings.

Zeitgebers: events in nature that tell the time of year

Morel season peaks in Appalachia but is just beginning at higher elevations in the far West and along the Canadian border. Bass move to the shallows. Termites swarm. Cabbage butterflies visit the developing cabbage sets.

When tulips are in full bloom in the North, the best of the spring wildflowers have all disappeared in the Southwest. But you can still find prickly pear cacti flowering in the desert.

When all the petals fall from your crab apples, then the great spring dandelion bloom reaches far into the Northeast, trumpeter swans will be laying eggs near Yellowstone Lake and goslings will be hatching throughout the lower Midwest.

Birders look for migrating white-throated sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped warblers, magnolia warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks and orioles.

In the field and garden

When multiflora roses come into flower, look for the bronze birch borer to emerge and oystershell scale eggs to hatch. And when American holly blooms (about the same time as the multiflora roses), then potato leafhoppers will be hopping in the potatoes.

Orchard grass is heading up. Prune forsythia, quince, mock orange and lilac after flowering is complete. Carpenter bees continue to arrive, looking for nesting sites; seal and caulk your siding. Increase planting now: try to finish by the beginning of the Strawberry Rains late in the month.

Remove seed heads from rhubarb. Alfalfa is budding; some farmers are cutting it to control weevils. Migrant workers move north.

Excitement or stress caused by traffic or predators can increase feed requirements in your livestock and/ or promote weight loss.

Let sunlight into the barn and outbuildings when the weather is clear this summer. Give your chicken coops a thorough spring cleaning, too!

Use silage and hay supplements to take up the feeding slack if pasture plants have an unusually high water content.

When clovers bloom, flea season intensifies for pets and livestock. Flea beetles come feeding in the vegetable garden, too.

Mind and body

The SAD Index (which measures on a scale from 1 to 100 the forces thought to be associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder) swells with the waxing moon during this period, reaching the disquieting 40s between May 14 and 17. After that, however, it plummets into the gentle 20s once again

Journal

I’ve been thinking about the simple (simplistic?) phenology “laws” I put together several years ago, one of them being that if something in nature happens once, it will probably happen again (without which supposition no one could make any sort of plans). But looking back over my notes, the most obvious principle might be that if something happens once in nature, it has probably happened before. For example, the hepaticas and bloodroots, bluebells and violet cress that grace Glen Helen now are flowers from history.

Uncertainty about the future that accompanies the Anthropocene does not affect what has already happened. If the present is tentative, and if the future is in grave danger, at least their antecedents are not. And so the enjoyment of what happens in this instant (these leafing skunk cabbages, these blossoming cowslips) has deep roots in time and need not be dismissed as threatened or ephemeral. The past is not undone.

I look deeply into the repeating mirror of the mirror of recollection that recreates near identical images and happenings back and back, not only through the years of my lifetime, but so far beyond, hundreds of years, into an imagined infinity. So I am here in all of time, firmly settled in the passage, no matter what lies ahead.

I depend not only on the likelihood that spring will come again because it is coming now; I depend on the certainty of all springs that ever were.