New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Wow, absolutely wow, for today. Here we are heading into fall, yet today was as good as you could hope for in  a summer's day. And I took the best of it with a great last trip to the sea with my friend Jean. Fall was at hand in the views, but the air was all summer today. Inland it hit 80 degrees, and wasn't that much cooler right along New Hampshire's coast.

 

Today the sky was perfectly blue as we headed out through Back Channel in Portsmouth on Jean's boat. The morning air warmed up so quickly to a summer-like feel. Just as I peeled off my shirt to my T-shirt I heard a flock of geese to the north. They looked like they had just taken off, but were headed due-south and were forming into a V right overhead as they quickly gained altitude as they swept the sky southward. I quickly took a picture.

 

As we got underway I immediately began to see monarch butterflies drifting southward as well. In fact there was a steady procession of them all day. One by one they flittered in the west breeze, some a few hundred yards off the shore, but a steadiest line of them were crossing the Piscataqua River right as it enters the sea. It almost looked like a river of orange specks dancing 10 to 15 feet above the fast moving water current. I was immersed in two rivers at right angles to each other as we headed west inside of the Whale Back Light House. The Piscataqua River was draining east as the tide was going out, and the air was draining of monarchs as they migrated south.

 

Fish were scarce for us today. I did manage to find one striper near the Coast Guard Station. I figured the juvenile alewives should be migrating out to sea this week and I imagined a huge school of stripers laying at the mouth of the river simply opening their mouths to feast on the slurry of seaward herring. Maybe next year.

 

But fall colors filled our distant views. On the Kittery side as we headed into the river the shore was lined for a distance with bright orange maples right to the edge of the deep blue sea. The hills beyond were dotted with reds and orange shades.

 

Here inland the trees are not far from peak. The colors are spectacular every where. And today's summer temperatures have brought the crickets into the loudest trumpeting of the year. A hard frost is predicted for Friday night. How soon the trumpets will be silenced.

 

Tomorrow and Friday I will be stocking pheasants again from Hopkinton to the west to Exeter on the east. What a great job it is to travel the state this time of year to watch the weekly changes in the color. There is just so much to take in and enjoy these next few weeks.