Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [0]
Summer World
A Season of Bounty
To Rachel
Contents
Introduction
1 Preparing for Summer
2 Awakening
3 Wood Frogs
4 The Early Birds
5 Bald-Faced Hornet Nests
6 Mud Daubers and Behavior
7 The Blues
8 Artful Diners
9 Masters of Disguise
10 Cecropia Moths
Photographic Insert
11 Calosamia Collapse
12 New England Longhorns
13 Flies
14 The Hummingbird and the Woodpecker
15 Deaths and Resurrections
16 Extreme Summer
17 Moss, Lichens, and Tweedlaarkanniedood
18 Perpetual Summer Species
19 Ant Wars
20 Blackbirds
21 Silent Summer
22 Ending Summer
23 The Last Peep
Selected References
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Bernd Heinrich
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
MARCH OFTEN BRINGS HEAVY SNOWFALLS HERE in Maine and Vermont. It’s cold outside and I spend much of my time behind windowpanes in a bubble of tropical environment created by our wood-burning stove. I’m waiting for summer. Here in the north temperate zone, “summer” usually lasts for roughly half the year, from May through October. It’s the time most of us (who are not recreational skiers) live or at least wait for.
Day after day I gaze at the white expanse of the beaver bog by our house to wait and hope for the red-winged blackbirds to return. Instead, in my mind’s eye during March I see a family of beavers entombed in their lodge, which sticks up like a big lump above the thick snow-covered ice on the pond. The beavers’ bubble for sustainable life is now a mere platform of sticks inches above the ice-cold water. It’s barely large enough to move around in, and they live there in continuous darkness. Occasionally one or another of the beaver family holds its breath for several minutes as it dives into the hole next to its platform that is kept ice-free, to bring back a twig and chew off the bark. I identify with these beavers, because like theirs, much of my living is, for months, repressed and in my own bubble. Summer releases it.
The world right now seems dead, but some birds are already stirring. Hairy and downy woodpeckers have started to drum; black-capped chickadees sound off their “dee-dahs” at dawn; and the first robins have returned, and they hop where snow has melted along roadsides. Dawn is a bit earlier each day, and I awake with yearning and anticipation.
In my nostalgia for summers past and anticipation of summers to come, I think of swimming, basking in the sun while wiggling into warm sand at the beach, and reveling in the sights, sounds, and smells of flowers, bees, and birds. I think of the dances on balmy nights as we swung and do-si-doed our partners and sweated to fiddle music at the town hall; and of bass fishing on Bog Stream, where we canoed past floating lily pads and big white water lily blossoms. I think of the school year coming to a close.
For me, summer used to begin on the first day of school vacation, the season of long days. A more universal and just as specific beginning of summer (in the northern hemisphere) is probably around 20 March, the vernal (spring) equinox (“equal night”), when the night and the day are the same length. The height of northern summer is near 21 June, the summer solstice (corresponding to the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere), when in the north the days are the longest and we receive the most sunshine in the year. However, this is designated as the beginning of summer, not the height, because the maximum warmth is yet to come; it takes about a month and a half before the northern lands and oceans, still cold from the winter, have reheated. Then, after the summer solstice, the days shorten until about ninety-four days later, on 22 September, when they are again equal. On 21 December, the winter solstice, the days are shortest. Again, owing to the temperature lag from the just-cooled earth and ocean, this date is called the beginning of winter, not its peak.
Almost all of life on the surface of the earth is fueled by the enormous amounts of energy intercepted from