October lilac. Photo by Mike Lunsford
Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about the “predictable beauty” of the natural world, how I often visit the same spots on my walks and usually witness familiar autumn miracles: cedar waxwings and false sunflowers, wrecked milkweed and low-hanging paw-paws.
Yet, fall is a season of surprises too. In a matter of days, we are going to wake to an unexpected frost, and already the very landscape we see is changing by the day. For example, because my farmer friend across the road cracked the whip on several late-night combining sessions, I went to the mailbox a few days ago to see the fields west of us transformed from a sea of leafless champagne-colored soybeans to an open horizon of picked-over stubble. I hear the roar of grain dryers now, something that I haven’t noticed in quite some time.
As of this writing, we are not seeing a lot of autumn color out of our woods-side windows just yet. A stiff breeze we had one afternoon last week brought down a warm shower of yellowing black cherry leaves that helped us get into the mood for fall, but it’s been the cooler nights that really got us thinking of it even more.
It may take a while yet, but orange and gold and red will soon do a quick-change from late-summer green, and appropriately so, because our small electric heaters have been dutifully slipped out of bathroom cabinets and I have readied old tarps and rakes, ready to do battle in my yard over the next month or so. I have already collected buckets of fallen walnuts, seen the smashed remnants of hedge apples on the roads, and started the process of running a blade across drooped irises and skeletal coneflowers; I have taken to wearing a long-sleeved shirt until mid-morning too.
One of the biggest surprises October has given to us are the lilacs we have blooming anew near our front door. By September, the bush I moved there a half-dozen years ago had dropped its mildewed leaves and seemed dead, but now bright new green buds have sprouted and fragrant — although smallish — blooms have come on. We have no idea why the lilacs are resurrected, but it has been a pleasant and colorful gift, one that may be attributed to subtle climatic change, or simple happenstance.
On the other hand, we’ve also noticed a lack of color nearby at our bird feeders. Although I have an abundance of house sparrows ransacking my stations, we simply aren’t seeing the flashes of cardinal red and blue jay blue right now. Missed much of the summer, both of those birds — and other colorful species — have taken a powder from our yard and woods. I saw good numbers of migratory warblers a few weeks back, but the birds we usually see settling in for the winter, like the red-headed and red-bellied and downy woodpeckers are at the very least, tardy in big numbers.
I’ve not read as much on the subject of climate change as I should have, but it is obvious, to me anyway, that our seasons are changing, and with it, perhaps, our birds’ habits and our trees’ patterns. I spoke with Dr. Jeffery Dukes, Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, about my observations, and he made it clearer to me that a more accurate way to describe our climate is not as “changed,” but as “changing.” With that in mind, I feel that our longer, hotter, wetter summers have come at the expense of both spring and fall, which appear shorter than they used to be.
Dukes suggested that I take a look at the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment, which I did. There’s too much there to digest in a few sittings, but sifting through the data on the length of an ever-expanding growing season in our state has me convinced that the next few decades — climate-wise — are not going to look like those of the past.
“You’ll see from the reports that Indiana has been getting warmer and, more dramatically, wetter in recent years,” Dukes told me. “I can’t say for sure that those trends are linked to the changes you’ve been seeing in fall color, or cardinals, or lilacs, but our climate is changing in ways that could cause at least a couple of those shifts. You’ll also see that future projections have us getting much warmer, wetter in the winter and spring, and stormier, by which I mean we’ll be getting more of our rain and snow in bigger events,” he added.
Perhaps I am reading too much into these observations; maybe they are merely the ruminations of someone who finally has taken the time to pay attention to things. For instance, I have been watching a hornets’ nest in my woods for the past few weeks. Discovering a nest is always a surprise for me, for only in the fall do I usually notice them after they are revealed when the first leaves begin to dry and fall.
The first time I saw this nest — about 15 feet in the air on the outer limbs of a sugar maple — it was clearly occupied, its bald-faced drones busily conducting their usual serious hornet business. But now, and despite continued warm days and frostless nights, I have not seen a single hornet near the nest; they appear to be gone, which makes no sense. In the past, I have seen hornets around their nests even after an early snow has fallen.
Dukes tells me, “The climate will be a moving target, and we’ll often be wondering whether the shifts in our festivals, our flora, and our fauna are happening because of that long and gradual warming and wetting, or whether it’s just an odd year.”
For me, having lilacs in October is simply a pleasant surprise.
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