New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Seems like we are in the "between times" of the year. How quiet the birds have suddenly become. Oh, the occasional song or call is about. Well, let me just open my Merlin app. and give it the one or maybe even two-minute test here mid-day. Well, I'm happy to report my Merlin app. has an Indigo Bunting and an American Goldfinch right out my window. I can hear neither myself nor I have not seen the bunting yet. I will be on the watch for it for sure. But bird sounds are few. Some frogs sound still flow my way as I spend time into the night out on my deck overlooking the Suncook River and the meadow adjacent to the river. 

 

MY best life-long friend Rick Hamlett has come east for a few days from Minnesota where he moved to in 2020 to be near his daughter and young family. Nice to unravel time with him setting on the deck these warm summer nights. We learned to hunt and fish and just plain explore Nature for most of our lives. He built a house in 1985 less than a mile from me and lived there close to forty years. 

 

As we set on my deck well into the night after the sun set, we both realized just how quiet it had become. Save for the occasional bark of a green frog down in the beaver pond meadow, all was silent. It just seemed that we had no life around us. The summer slumber of Mother Nature, I guess. Oh, she did shower us with a few sparks from fireflies on and off.  Like stirring a campfire with a stick, the firefly sparks arose out of nowhere. And the dog on occasion came out of the house and down the steps triggering a spotlight to come on for a few minutes. How quickly a few moths appeared to then dance about the light. Mostly small white ones from my perch. Nary a cricket has begun to call this late July. Our night will soon be filled with their voices as we head towards fall.  

 

It was the sky that entranced me the most in the hours we sat and spoke. Not long after sunset, as the sky darkened, white puffy clouds scattered about the sky slowly marching Southwest were still singed from the long set sun well into the night. And just as that spectacle faded away, slowly the full moon's power set the tail end of the last of the retreating clouds aglow once more. And they parted the sky. 

 

So, a clear sky should have produced a crop of stars to harvest with our eyes. Not so. The ever-rising full moon was taking charge of the night sky. Oh yes, off to the north and east the stars brightly lit the night sky. Scrolling south across the heavens with our eyes brought a greatly diminished return on our stares. The growing power of a rising full moon soon had whitewashed the stars overhead and off to the southeast. 

 

Oh, how powerful the moon is. You can't help but being drawn into its powerful grasp on a summer's night.