Cooler days, darker mornings

Nell's Hill, 7:30 a.m., September 4 ,2013

The mornings are now so dark when Baby Dog and I take our walk that I no longer hear any birds, not even crows or the early-rising pewees.  Instead, we hear crickets and still a few cicadas.  I need my headlamp nearly every step of the way, especially on a moonless morning.  The eastern sky no longer holds any shade of yellow or orange, though I can see only the brighter stars.

The air feels like fall, now that the humidity has been chased out by this past weekend’s storms.  Some of the annual plants on the forest floor are yellowing, but the changes are not yet very far along. This morning I decided to take a photo of the mountain to my west, Nell’s Hill.  The trees aren’t yet touched by fall colors, so now seemed a good time to show what it looks like before the color change progresses.  I took the photo before the sun was well up, when the light hadn’t yet reached the base of the mountain.

This weekend I will likely take my air conditioner out of the kitchen window and store it until next year.  The weather forecast shows cooler temperatures through the next 10 days, and by then it’s unlikely the temperature will rise into the 90 degree range again. Summer’s strength is certainly broken, and fall is on its way.  As summers go, this one held only a few weeks of truly unbearable weather, and that was in July. August 2013 was actually one of the cooler on record, the kind I only see once every decade or so.

With the mornings dark again, my morning birdwatching has come to an end, at least on work days. I’ll have to be content with checking only in the evenings and on weekends. That’s a lot hard to get used to than the cooler temperatures!