A circle of seasons #phenology

If you read the postings here, even irregularly, you've probably noticed postings on phenology interspersed with a variety of other topics. I enjoy noting and anticipating the patters and cycles of the  seasons in our North Country. Initially, when I was living in Massachusetts, I became fascinated by the movements of migratory fish like the striped bass, which were reported to arrive at Cape Cod about the time some kind of leaf reached the size of a mouse's ear. Even earlier in the season, phenology helped me anticipate when the flounder would have moved within casting range of the beach on Duxbury Bay, sometimes as early as March, more often in April.

mid-June, whitetail fawn

Photo by J. Harrington

Summertime was for fishing and trap or skeet. Autumn posed difficult choices. Head for Vermont and ruffed grouse or Cape Cod and stripers moving South for the Winter? Later the choices became ducks or grouse.

Here in Minnesota, fishing (especially trout fly hatch timings), hunting, and foraging have been joined by wildflowers and migratory birds and butterflies as phenological topics of interest. Since Spring normally moves North at about 12 or so miles per day, and Minnesota is about 400 miles long, it takes Spring about a month to travel from the Iowa border to the Rainy River. So, one often must be more specific when talking about the phenology of seasonal events here. Nevertheless, the Minnesota FreshWater Calendar informs us that about now is when fireflies and luna moths start showing up at night and whitetail deer fawns have been arriving for the past couple of weeks or so. The North Woods Journal notes that this is the season when balsam poplar and cottonwood trees shed their fluff.

All the preceding is but a lead up to my discovery this morning that a book about haiku that I'm reading has lists of "season words." I'm now toying with the idea of seeing how many of those word might also be relevant to Minnesota and what they might look like if laid out on a phenology wheel.

A Meeting

by Mary Oliver

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

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