RIVER WATCHER

A TIME TO RISE AND SHINE

Rex Burress

The May meeting at the Feather River Nature Center adjourned at six o'clock—and as I departed I saw shiny white blossoms breaking out of the long branch-stems of the Wavey-leafed Soap Plant along the road!

Of course! It was their time of year, and their time of day, to rise and shine! “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...” Ecclesiastes 3:1. I sat upon a stone in the middle of the tall stems to share their glory of the day. The soap plant, Chlorogalum pomeridianum, is quite unusual in that the star-shaped blossoms wait to open until about six o'clock in the evening, whereas most blossoms of other flower species open in the morning to receive the warmth and light of the rising sun! Some flowers, like the California Poppy, close petals at night, not to open until sufficient light the next day to accommodate diurnal insects.

Soap plants act in reversal and tarry to bloom until most of the early year wildflowers have declined and dried, their seeds developed and dispersed, ready for another spring. Most pollinating insects, especially honey bees, are active when the temperature is over 56 degrees, and by six p.m. when the soap plant opens, the day crew has mostly retired. To the rescue is a small black bumblebee, buzzing among the blossoms, sipping sweet nectar and spreading pollen, as if the arrangement had been made by an ethereal Flower Director! The six bright petals--three petals and three sepals-- make a good target in the dusk!

I thought of these things while sitting there, freshly reminded of the relationship of the blossom and the bee, and the snappy unfolding of the petals as if spring-released. By dawn the blossom's work is done, and the fresh vitality is withered and limp. The next evening, half a dozen new blossoms will open, and the hardy bumble bees will come.

After years of watching this fascination of nature, there was a mental expectation of what to expect, and a resurgence of joy in the repetition. Rachel Carson said, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter” [and soap plant blossoms in May evenings!].

The soap plant has many potentials. Native Americans found various uses for the bulb foundation that the leafless stem grows from-- a perennial, brown, fiber-wrapped bulb of onion-like layers, able to perform like sweet-scented soap. The outer fibers were made into brushes, and the chunks crushed to stun fish, among uses. But the wonder and beauty of its place and time in the evolution of life is the over-looming miracle.

Another seasonal expectation is the arrival of migratory waterfowl in the fall, a rhythm that is as regular as the turning of the Earth on its axis. When summer turns to autumn in the north-lands, when frosts subdue the exuberance of plant growth, the birds pack up their regular instincts and take to the sky, returning to places of subsistence like the central valley marshes of California. The time becomes a new page for the wildlife watcher.

On a similar plane, Monarch butterflies return to their winter sanctuaries along the Pacific Coast, and for middle America Monarchs, it's wintertime in certain trees of middle Mexico! You can depend on it...as long as butterflies fly and milkweed grows and refuge is provided. We watch the flycatchers depart in the fall, and return to the north in the spring. You can depend on it. The swallows will return on cue. The salmon will surge from the sea in the fall, up rivers to home. In each and every land, you can depend on nature adjusting to the season...as long as the rivers flow...and plants grow. You can depend on it.

“Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth, next to humans.”--E. O. Wilson