sumac

I went for a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with gratitude for the warm day and yet wanting very much to find autumn. That’s a season I look forward to each year, and in this changing climate it is apt to hide behind 80 degree days and dusty drought.

Starting at 3:00pm under sunny skies, I walked up to the top of the hill and sat down to watch, listen, and write a little. it was 82.7F in the shade, with the crowns of post oak trees still covered in green leaves and swaying in the breeze. A little sumac shrub in front of me was brightly backlit by the sun in vibrant green with a little red. Other sumacs had mostly just dropped their leaves, skipping the part where they might live up to names like “flameleaf.”

*A few red leaves on some sumac along the hillside*

After a while I walked over to the boulder trail and watched a couple of gulls wheeling and hovering above me. There was some wispy high clouds like a feathery splash of cream in the pale blue sky, while on the ground the shadows were lengthening as 4 o’clock approached.

There was some red in nearby sumacs and a few red leaves of some other plant species. The scarcity of colorful leaves made them that much more welcome. Part of my wish for autumn is the hope of seeing yellows, reds, and oranges as the retreating chlorophyll exposes whatever other colors were masked behind the green. Those colors are part of what confirms that autumn is here, and so I’m grateful for each turning leaf. The rest of the woodland, in somewhat desiccated shades of green, seemed stripped of their place within the season, a shadow of summer.

*A patch of sunlight backlit this sumac so that it glowed like fire*

The clouds drifted, and a few had a hook or curve before stretching out southward or westward, caught and pulled by the currents flowing across the sky. This would be a great afternoon for lying back and watching how clouds are pulled along or drift with the upper winds. Yesterday they seemed in a hurry, but now their movement played out in slow motion.

Merlin reported a blue jay and a hermit thrush, though I did not hear them. Overall it seemed quiet; the traffic seemed to be some distance off and the preserve itself was nearly silent. At 4:12pm it felt like sunset was approaching, and the breeze had come up a little.

In a few days, things will change. There are reports that it will rain, maybe quite a lot. After that, the high temperatures are supposed to remain in the 60s for a while, like we might expect in late November. I will keep walking regardless, because these places like Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, Tandy Hills Natural Area, the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge, are gifts that must not be neglected in any season.

I walked back to the trailhead and was gone at 4:30pm. But I won’t be gone for long.

*The top of a heart-sepal wild buckwheat*

After the long reprieve from Texas heat, with the rains of spring and early summer, we’re back to a more typical August. With temperatures climbing and the sun beating down, I decided it was time to take a walk at Southwest Nature Preserve. I was there from about 1:45-3:15pm.

Cricket frogs and turtles were busy at the North Pond, and dragonflies busily and silently did their dance, swooping and hovering. The Common Whitetail more than justified its name as the commonest of the dragonflies I saw.

*A Common Whitetail, perched on a branch*

I watched all this for a while, but the sun was merciless and I wanted a shadier place to roost. Up the red sandy trail and under some oaks, I turned to see a Texas Spiny Lizard on a Post Oak trunk, her body making an arc as she hung upside-down there, head pulled up to look at me and tail drooping a little away from the tree trunk. Like all such lizards who survive to adulthood, she was wary, and disappeared around the trunk as I moved in to ask for a photo.

Texas Spiny Lizards have had a heck of a year, with rain and runaway plant growth supporting a bumper crop of bugs. I hope they persist (as they always do, in some numbers) during the dry periods that may come. I never get tired of seeing these cute little reptiles that sometimes tolerate you coming close but always at some point scamper away, up and around the trunk, too fast for your eyes to follow.

I followed the trail at the back of the preserve and climbed up to the ridge where there could be more breeze. Around the little loop trail at the crown of the preserve, there is an old concrete pad left over from when it was a working farm, and I sat there for a while, enjoying the quiet. There is almost always some airplane noise, but the spot is on the other side of the ridge from most traffic and so you can escape much of the mechanized soundtrack of modern life, for a little bit.

Sumac is common in places at the preserve, and their seed heads can be a bright, velvety red before drying and darkening into the color of dried blood. Rob Denkhaus tells me I could make a tea out of it, and I’d like to find some growing somewhere that I could harvest a seed head or two and try it!

*Looking down from the ridge onto the trail below*

On the walk back to the trailhead, I saw one more of a kind of butterfly that seemed familiar – was it a Hackberry Butterfly like one I’d seen on a previous walk? I got a photo, and it appears that I was right. (Thanks, iNaturalist!)

*A Hackberry Butterfly, according to iNaturalist*

At the end, Weather Underground was reporting that the temperature in Arlington was 101ºF, with a heat index making feel like 117ºF. So it got pretty hot today, though the lizards and insects didn’t seem to care. It’s a little more troublesome for those of us whose bodies only operate in a narrow range around 98.6ºF, but a little shade and a little breeze got me through.

Our Lives In Nature

How nature supports, informs, and inspires our lives

Searching for Autumn

High Summer at Southwest Nature Preserve