RIVER WATCHER

SIGNS OF THE SEASONS

Rex Burress

There is no difficulty in finding signs of the season. Signs of nature activity is going on all the time wherever you are.

“Look round a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes,” so said Thomas Carlyle in the distant past, and environmental entertainment is just as active now as then, even though there are some subtle changes constantly in the landscape. In fact, every venture forth into a new day is wrought with potential wonder and surprises on an Earth that is never still. Only the promise of general patterns in nature retaining reliable basics reassures us that an oak tree will grow like an oak tree, and a scrub jay will look and act like a scrub jay...even though there remains the possibility of rare variations.

Along about September you begin to see an acceleration of leaf fade-and-drop leading into Autumn. The browning started a month early in the drought year of 2015 as trees unload excessive leaves to lighten their burden in the face of less water.

The California Buckeye tree in front of the Feather River Nature Center had totally brown leaves by mid-summer, which is the normal trait of Aesculus californica. It is a permanent water-conservation design that also directs added moisture to the all-important seed, but people usually think the tree is dead.

The buckeye business is a sign of the season you can expect, just as there is the annual expectation of migratory birds and salmon returning. Weather extremes such as drought, fire, flood, and a host of other factors can alter the normal pattern of life and death, but there is a standard of internal instructions poised to dominate in times of normalcy.

My nature bent has long been involved with signs of the seasons. Once I lived in the Alamo, CA hills and gathered writing ideas while tromping around Las Trampas Regional Park. In fact, I wrote a weekly nature column of that name for about seven years. “Signs of the Seasons” was published by the San Ramon Valley Herald at the Danville Tri-Valley News office. Editor John Mustard encouraged my nature watching/writing efforts, and I went on to also write “Oakland, Naturally” for15 years with the Bay Area Montclarion paper, picking up plenty of essay topics by merely watching the trailside, as I do presently with my “River Watcher” column.

Reporter Heather Hacking writes a delightful column, “Sow There,” for the Enterprise-Record, that is essentially a signs of the season subject right in her backyard! She also mentioned August 'drifts of dry leaves blown to the edge of the street,' and, 'another sign of fall is the appearance of bulbs for sale.' Signs of nature are found wherever life stirs. Naturalist John Burroughs said, “You have the whole wealth of the universe at your very doorstep.”

Thus I stepped forth to see what signs of the season I could find on August 26, 2015, in one small segment of Earth around the Feather River Nature Center. The drought is indeed evident in the hills and along the railroad tracks, but the river-fed riparian zone maintains a certain assemblage of green trees and shrubs. Quite evident are the depleted spike-like stalks of the native horseweed, Conyza canadensis, that line the road like tiny cornstalks. It is a time of dried stems, seed-case husks, galls on oak leaves, wild grapes, horsetail equisetum, vultures, and surging salmon. Watch!

“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own, and from morning to night,

as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy

that we can scarcely mark their progress.”

--Charles Dickens

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where others see nothing.”

--Camille Pissaro, French Impressionist, 1830-1903