September Is Always Full Of Surprises This monarch butterfly is fueling up for its long trip south to Mexico. "Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn." –(from "Barbara Frietchie" by John Greenleaf Whittier The ripening corn of September brings joy to the hearts of raccoons and white-tailed deer. Add apples to that fare and they will feast like royalty. Fortunate are those farmers and gardeners who can plant enough for both people and especially wildlife who know no bounds. Cold and wet weather this past late spring prevented the planting of our sweet corn until much later than usual, so September will be our corn month this year. There is no other vegetable as much as sweet corn, growing in our garden, with which we literally stuff ourselves each year. What we don’t devour is frozen for winter use. More and more crickets are adding their voices to the evening concert. Now and then a cicada’s high whine, feeble in its last stages, has nothing more to say but that which accompanies lowering temperatures of early fall. This is the season for closely watching and recording the visits of hummingbirds to one’s feeders. Our final young bird drank its last sugar water at our place on September 14 last year. Disregard any warnings on the packaging of the hummingbird feeders you are using, advising you to discontinue putting them out after Sept. 15. It is very conceivable that other hummingbirds will be migrating through our region in later September and even into early October and your offerings of sugar water may be all these birds need to be able to withstand an unusually cold night and another leg of their arduous journey south the following day. Maintain your hummingbird feeders until you no longer see these birds visiting them. Also challenging to observe and record on a daily basis are the migratory flights of monarch butterflies. They have already begun their unbelievable journey to their wintering grounds at high elevations in the mountains west of Mexico City. It’s always interesting to learn of the last fall sighting of this incredible butterfly in our area. The strikingly formed and subtly colored lichens, nature’s indicators of relatively clean unpolluted air, silent though they are, speak in their own way with loudness and clarity. "Nature’s way is the best way, free as it all may be. Stay here. You’ll not be sorry, for the best is yet to come." Already a small number of sugar maples are highlighted with their red-orange color. Invariably these are sickly stressed trees and not indicators of an early fall. Surely individual trees, due to their health, natural supply of soil minerals and moisture along with other delicate factors, will display color earlier or later, and be more colorful or less colorful. Sunny blue-sky days will help to produce vibrant reds and oranges in, for example, the sugar maple leaves. Should it happen that very few sunny days occur as the leaves change color, the intensity of a remarkable sugary chemical, anthocyanin, will be decreased. Thus the maples will be more yellow than orange or red. A killing frost does nothing to further good tree color. In fact it decreases its intensity. It was on the 14th of Sept. last year that my journal entry read in part: "Bird and animal-wise, this has been a ‘Silent Autumn’." By the next day there still was not a bird in sight at our place. Was there a sharp-shinned or a cooper’s hawk in the vicinity? Their appearance will often keep birds away from one’s feeders. Seeing the unexpected this month is "par for the course." I hope this will be a September to fondly remember! This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 09/04/2003. © Copyright 2003 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.