Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [2]
During the increasingly longer and brighter days after the vernal equinox, the purple-brown flower buds of the alders in the bog, and those of the birches, hazels, and quaking aspen that surround it, begin to get ready for summer. These plants had their flower buds fully formed in the fall, ready to pop open and bloom at the right moment. Some had already formed their new leaf buds in early July, during the warmth of the previous summer, to get a jump after winter for the brief summer to come. Not all northern buds “hold back” from July till next June. Some “jump the gun”—red oak buds, for example, on shoots that have access to direct sunlight, often “break” in July and produce a second shoot with another set of leaves, instead of waiting eleven months for the next year. Then, however, they still make another set of buds before winter.
To the bees in my two beehives under snow next to our house, the external world will scarcely have changed over the last several months, but they have also been getting ready. The queen will already have started laying eggs into the combs so the hive can field a large cohort of workers to exploit the big but brief first flush of bloom of the poplars and maples, long before the leaves appear.
Summer is “those lazy, hazy, crazy days” that Nat King Cole sang about. But is it more? I asked my eight-year-old daughter, Lena, to tell me what she thought it is, and she wrote me a poem that I give here verbatim: “Summer days are fun. They make me want to run, under the hot boiling sun! The days are long and light, I get to stay up late at night! It’s quite a starry sight! Screaming yelling, chanting! Running, jogging, panting!” I wonder where she gets her ideas, but to me her poem seems in tune with Roger Miller’s catchy rhythm and words from the 1960s: “In the summertime, when all the trees and leaves are green and the redbird sings, I’ll be blue, ’cause you don’t want my love.”
Summer is a time of green, urgency, and lots of love lost and found. It is the most intense time of the year, when the natural world of the northern hemisphere is almost suddenly populated with billions of animals awakening from dormancy, and billions more arriving from the tropics. Almost overnight there is a wild orgy of courting, mating, and rearing young. The main order of business in summer is reproduction, and the window of opportunity is short. Proximally, summer may be a frolic, but that masks the underlying competition and struggle, because for every new life of any one species there are necessarily, on average, equal numbers of deaths of that same species. Furthermore, for each of the large animals there are necessarily also hundreds or thousands of deaths of smaller ones of other species that get eaten to produce this life. And every one of them has evolved mechanisms to reduce its chances of being eaten.
THE KEY TO SURVIVAL IN WINTER IS FINDING SOLUTIONS to a combination of cold and scarce energy. Summer is the opposite situation. One could consider the summer world as delineated by survival at high temperatures and limited by water; and although I provide a brief reference to the “extreme” summer of physical constraints, as in the desert, I have chosen instead to look at the ingenuity of life more locally, as life-forms interact with one another—the main order of business in the summer. I focus mainly on what I see and saw played out in the familiar world that is at the doorstep of my log cabin in Maine, in a clearing in the woods. In addition, I paid as much or more attention to all this at our home along a dirt road in rural Vermont. Our house is surrounded by woods, a beaver bog, a vegetable garden, a couple of beehives, bird boxes, a woodshed, and patches of wild and cultivated flowers and fruit trees. I decided to live two summers actively observant. I wanted to pursue the interesting and often puzzling, without taking the seemingly prosaic for granted.
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Preparing