New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

A toadaly nice day.

Tuesday 08/23/2005

Wow, what great weather we have had the last few days and it is expected to last a few more. Nights down into the 50's and days dry and in the 70's. It seems like we have turned the corner looking into fall. And I have been catching glimpses of fall the last few days.

First of all, in the last 5 or 6 days I have noticed when the breeze kicks up there are numerous brown dead leaves tumbling from above. While they are not the usually color full leaves of fall, never-the-less the trees are giving them up for some reason. In some places I have noticed the ground practically covered with brown leaves. And today while bringing my son Adam home from the Manchester Airport I saw a red maple half colored in orange! I'm sure it was a stressed tree, but it sure looked like fall. Usually it is the swamp maples whose roots are inundated by water that first give up the green color to their leaves. This takes place the last week of August most years in perennial wetlands. I haven't seen this started yet.

This week has been spider week. In some of my hikes through the woods, both day and night, I feel the touch of a spiders web on my face as I walk. Spiders are really spidering right now. It seems that their webs are every where. Perhaps it is also because this is when the chilly nights cast a dew on to the land highlighting the spiders webs. My neighbor noticed the power lines from here to the Epsom circle decorated with spider webs earlier this week. Again it is the dew that brings them into vision to our eyes.

I spent some time on the Suncook River last evening for a couple hours at last light. Bats and bugs were very active. There was a number of dragon flies. The big dragon fly hatch took place here a week ago with a couple of smaller hatches since. Rick had a huge hatch down the river Saturday. Apparently some mosquito sized insects had hatched out in huge numbers and were hovering in the air right over his lawn. He noticed a few minutes later that hundreds of dragon flies had moved in for a feast. He and his daughter laid on the lawn under this whirling mass. He said insect legs and wings were just raining down on them as the dragon flies devoured the insects above. It was snowing insect parts.

I have been back to the acorn and beech sampling sites to permanently mark the 25 trees in each plot and number them. At my first tree today a huge toad struggled to get out from near the base of the tree. Even a dim witted toad had sense enough to distance itself from me as I was about to paint. I paint far better with words than with a brush! So the toad kind of turned my day into a toadaly nice one. My guess is that she was a big female probably well into her teenage years. As I type this the crickets own the air around my house with their loud and very pleasant chorus. It is hard to believe that probably in less than a month they will be all silenced by a killing frost. It will happen all too soon for me. Off to camp with my son for a couple of days. He has not made it up to camp in a couple of years.