It’s January and I saw the kestrel is paired up today while walking the dogs. We installed a nesting box for her three years ago and she has used it faithfully every year since.
That got me thinking about what’s next, because nature is a sort of calendar for us since we moved here. One event leads to another. It’s a wonderful, peaceful way of tracking time, when we can slow down enough to pay attention to it.
Later this month we’ll start hearing the Pacific treefrogs in our wet pasture areas (and our new pond, we hope!). Sometimes the noise is so loud it’s hard to hear someone talking to you. We love it!
February brings the robins back and it is also what I call salamander season, when we have to start watching where we walk on the logging road. Stopping to watch salamanders slowly meander across my path will never get old!
March means we’ll see the first barn swallows (always a very big deal!) and April brings the violet green swallows.
April is also when the migrating birds start showing up in the woods behind our property. The bird song gets louder as we move into May and the Merlin Bird ID app installed on my phone starts telling me I’m hearing 20 or more birds at once. It’s mind blowing!
Then as we progress into summer, it’s bees and butterflies and dragonflies.
Admittedly, summer is kind of a blur because we are so busy, and it brings with it invasive weeds to hunt down and dispatch. But it also means baby swallows. The violet green swallows usually only hatch one batch but the barn swallows easily do two and sometimes three. It is a delight to see them in their nests (barn swallows) or sticking their heads out of the nesting boxes we’ve installed for the violet green swallows.
Once the nestlings are fledglings and all are flying around, we see the swallows start to gather in groups which tells us they are getting ready to fly south in the late summer, early fall. That’s when we start to hear the crickets and grasshoppers in the pastures and the bird song in the woods starts to quiet down as those birds fly off and start their fall migration.
That’s also about the time I start walking through spiderwebs when walking the dogs in the woods. I haven’t yet figured out the seasonal significance of that one!
By October, it’s quiet as nature starts settling down for a good winter’s rest. We are usually busy doing our winter prep, from storing hay to spreading gravel to stacking firewood to canning. So I look forward to that rest as much as nature does, I think.
It’s not an exact calendar by any means. I certainly couldn’t schedule a work meeting or dentist appointment using it. But it is fun to be dialed into the world going on around me, because nature doesn’t need to know the date on the calendar. Nature knows what needs to happen when. And paying attention to that grounds me and slows me down, especially in winter as I’m learning to appreciate the restful time of dark.
Wherever you live, I hope you get the benefit of nature’s calendar too, and you find some joy in it.
And that’s all for now…
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