Monthly Archives: September 2020

Fall

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Apparently, from what I can find, autumn is called fall for the exact reason you might think it is — this is the season when leaves fall.

But not only leaves. When I was walking the dogs a few days ago, we came into an area where a lot of large oak trees overhang the road. These were falling from the trees.

A lot of them were falling. I could hear them hitting the leaves, and I could hear them hitting the road around us. I thought about recording the sound of falling acorns, but, even though they were falling frequently, I figured I wouldn’t be able to get a good recording. Oaks are pretty shy about that kind of thing.

I think we were all fortunate that none of them hit us.

These acorns come from the chestnut oak (Quercas montana), the most common oak around this part of the mountain. The chestnut oak itself is quite common from Massachusetts all the way down the mountainous spine of the East to Mississippi. It has a cousin, the swamp chestnut oak, which grows in lowland areas, as opposed to our chestnut oak, which, as its name implies, grows in higher elevations.

Our chestnut oak’s acorns are among the largest in the US.

The Wikipedia article says the chestnut oak acorn ranges in size up to around 1 1/2 inches. As you can see, one of the acorns I picked up from the road is around that size. The swamp chestnut oak’s acorns may be larger (or maybe not). The bur oak’s acorns are said to be larger, but bur, or burr, oaks don’t grow around here.

These are good throwing acorns. They are also useful as chew toys for dogs, although apparently the taste discourages them from chewing too long. Wildlife find them appetizing. There are other places along the road where squirrels have had a picnic and left all the chewed up skins on the road. The acorns of the white oak group, of which the chestnut oak is a member, have less tannins and are therefore less bitter than acorns from the red oaks. I don’t really know because I haven’t sampled them.

Another thing the Wikipedia article says is that the wood of the chestnut oak is dense and makes good firewood. I have found that to be true, second only to the dogwood, I think. A few years ago we cut several large oaks that were threatening the garage at our old house, and they burned well. It is not uncommon to see several trunks sprouting from the same spot, which tends to make them somewhat weak as they get bigger. For that reason I cut any that were close to the house. At our new house we have mainly pines and maples, so I haven’t had the chance to try much oak in our wood burning stove.

But if one of the oaks along the road had actually dropped an acorn on my head, I might have considered a little oak rustling.

Little lizard

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Mollie brought this little lizard into the house Saturday afternoon.

It’s small, probably only about an inch and a half long. I have seen a few young lizards like this on the driveway. It was only a matter of time until Mollie caught one.

This one seemed unharmed. I scooped it up and took it outside. I released it on an old oak stump not far from the house.

It’s an Eastern Fence Lizard. I think it’s probably a male, and probably only weeks to a couple of months old. Adults are around four to seven inches long.

They have a fairly large range, from northern Florida to New Jersey and New York in the north, and from the Atlantic coast as far west as Colorado and Wyoming.

They are arboreal, although they are so well camouflaged that they must be hard to see on a tree. The imported fire ant can attack and kill these lizards as well as their eggs. I hope my usual practice of killing every fire ant nest I find helps these little creatures.

Rain approaches

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It has been dry here at our little spot on top of the mountain. There has been spotty rain around, but very little of it has fallen on us. Almost three weeks ago we watched as rain moved across town towards us.

There were at least two separate showers, one to the right of this image, and another to the left. The falling rain eventually obscured town. Then it moved closer, obscuring the ridge that is in bright sunlight in this image. We prepared for the rain. I expected raindrops to start falling on the steps down from the porch. We waited.

And then, nothing. It missed us again.

We have watched a band of rain on our weather radar app approaching us and then dissipating or splitting and passing around us many times. I think I have mentioned it before. That sort of thing is not really unusual; rain showers hit one place and miss another all the time. But it has happened so many times that I was beginning to wonder whether there was actually some geological or meteorological phenomenon that made our particular spot on the mountain less likely to get rain.

And then I talked to a bicyclist I see fairly often while I’m walking the dogs. He lives in a neighborhood about four or five miles from us and often climbs the mountain on his rides. He stopped and we talked about rain. He told me that he felt like his particular little spot in his neighborhood was also singled out for drought.

So, two places not far apart that have some strange phenomenon that suppresses rain? I don’t think so. That convinced me that nature’s rain grudge against us was an illusion. It seems like it happens a lot because we notice it when it happens, but we don’t notice it when it doesn’t happen.

But we still need rain.

Cicada song

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It’s cicada season here in Georgia. They are everywhere in the woods. Their song is loud, droning and constant during the day. At night the crickets take up the task of constant song, and the cicadas do intermittent solos. If you are the kind of person who needs complete quiet at night, you can’t sleep with the windows open.

As for me, their sound tends to fade into the background, and I mostly don’t notice it. When I walked the dogs on Sunday, we went all the way down the mountain and then back to the top before I suddenly woke up to the sound. It was hard to believe that I didn’t notice it before. I recorded this video strictly for the sound.

The buzzing was amazingly loud. What you can’t tell from the video sound is that the buzzing seemed to circle around me. There was a constant sound all around, but overlaid on that was a louder buzz that seemed to circle around us. I don’t know whether it was real or an illusion.

The cicadas this year are almost certainly the annual type. I think, based on the images here, that ours are Southern Resonant/Great Pine Barrens Cicadas. Georgia also has 13-year and 17-year cicadas, none of which were due to emerge this year.

Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, eating away at grass and tree roots. When they emerge, they climb up a vertical surface and moult, leaving their exoskeletons behind to be picked off the bark of pine trees by little boys.

They die soon after mating. We occasionally find one in its death throes on the driveway. The dogs are fascinated by them. They nose them and then when they start buzzing, they want to eat them like crunchy little treats. Mollie the cat also sometimes brings them in, usually unharmed. Then we have to push the dogs out of the way so we can scoop them up and toss them back outside.

Henry’s birthday

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Today, September 2, 2020, would be my brother Henry’s 73rd birthday.

It was about two and a half months after his 70th birthday that he called me and said that something strange had happened. That was the observation in an ultrasound of spots on his liver, and his doctor’s implication that it foretold a distressing diagnosis. Eventually we learned that the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer, and it had spread to his liver and other organs.

The doctor guessed that Henry had about a good year to live. He died 216 days after his 70th birthday.

Henry will never be older than 70, and I am catching up to him. I will pass him in December, and then I will no longer have an older brother.