Walking in the woods with leaves

Taking pretty fall photos this year is more challenging than I’m used to.  I have to take photos shortly after sunrise or just before sunset to tease out much color.  For most of the day, the leaves simply look dingy, which is not typical at all.  Most years, sunset or sunrise light is too strong, and a gray day shows off the colors better.  Not this year.

Yesterday’s late afternoon light made even dingy trees look a lot prettier and more orange than I expected.  And what better color than orange to post on Halloween?

This year’s leaves will soon all be on the ground. Today a bit of a breeze is helping to bring them down. I notice that even a slight shift in the wind direction brings a new flurry of leaf drop.  Today, the direction is SSE, a direction I haven’t had for a couple of weeks, and that seems to be all that is needed to speed up the leaf fall.  Today, the wind speed is no stronger than it’s been for a week or more, but the wind direction is different than the more normal NW or westerly direction. That change means the wind strikes the leaves from a different angle, and for some leaves that’s all it takes to bring them down.

Walking through a forest when the leaves are falling is fun.  I can feel and hear the leaves dropping all around me and on me.  I have to resist the automatic urge to bat them away, like I would with an insect.  Instead, I walk into the falling leaves, feel them light on my jacket, tickle my face and then crunch underfoot.  A thousand leaves are falling all at once, and you need a whole forest to get the full effect.  Now’s the time to try it.    

Step carefully! Forest underfoot

Most years I don’t have to watch where I put my every step when I’m in the woods. This year the wildflowers are so profuse that I pretty much have to. The rue anemone are especially thick this year, which is particularly impressive when you remember that one plant is rarely more than 4-6 inches across.

Last evening on my evening walk I came across several patches with 50 or more flowers, all in bloom. Many more patches produced 20+ blooms, and the space between patches was usually only a few feet.

Last year the wild geraniums were the showstopper. This year it is the anemone. The geraniums are out, and with more to come, but I’m not finding nearly as many as I did last year. The first mayapples are nearly out, if not yet fully in bloom.

It’s interesting to me to pay attention to the variations in wildflowers from year to year. Weather conditions, snow cover, rains, warmer or cooler temperatures—each slight change favors one flower over another in that year. This year had a very snowy winter followed by a very early and warm March (and now a cooler and drier April). The anemone liked that combination. Last year was a nearly snowless winter with a cool spring, and the wild geraniums were thrilled.

The enormous biodiversity of the native eastern forest can cope with a wide variety of weather, and responds with subtle variations in its flora just as quickly. That’s part of what makes a forest so interesting to me. A forest is never the same, not from year to year or month to month and sometimes not even from morning to night. Still, a visitor does have to look to see the differences. Skimming your eyes across the trees isn’t going to capture those differences, and it’s these tiny differences, I believe, that make the whole of a forest so precious.

Night and dawn

The forest was dark when Dog and I began our morning walk today. The night sky was already starting to pale, but the trees still held the darkness close under the canopy of leaves. Today, the first sound I heard was not the sweet summer call of the pewee, the forest’s earliest riser. It was the hoot of a great horned owl, the night hunter.

The owl was a short distance up the mountain from us, its hoots loud enough to resonate. What better sign could there be that the days are already shortening? Instead of the morning bird calls I’ve been accustomed to for the past several months, today the night caller was still reigning the woods.

Dog and I hadn’t gotten far before the pewee began to sing, and for a few minutes I heard both the last call of night’s creature and the first call of morning’s. The owl would hoot, and it seemed the pewee answered, the two calling back and forth with perfect timing. For a few minutes the two shared the forest, in that hazy time when both night and dawn appear to be the same. And then it was truly dawn, and the owl retreated, while the pewee continued its song, this time a solo.