August is the New Autumn
27 August 2024
Autumn has arrived with blackberries and crows. Webs span the teasels while the spiders hide in drying leaves. Damsons are picked and cooked, and apples are mostly off the tree. It is the second week of August.
Last week, when it was summer, flotsam and jetsam rode the currents of a southern wind, and I watched a ribbon of silver birch detach and twist up into a blue sky. Cabbage white butterflies floated past like lace. A hawker dragonfly zigzagged the hedge with the speed of a shuttle on a loom. After a few minutes he broke his patrol to skim the ponds. Whatever he wanted, we did not have it, and he left, flying high over the rowans to the next garden.
Two months ago, little red damselflies were not so picky about our ponds and held extended assignations on the yellow flag iris. Now the flowers are gone and all we have is green and green and green – green duckweed, green horsetail, green algae. I assumed the hawker was looking for prey and I was surprised he couldn’t find his bugs – the sparrows still get very excited in the brambles and on sunny days the bees cloud the marjoram.
One balmy morning a family of spiders invaded the geraniums. They flashed their little white bodies in the bright sun, excited hatchlings on a first outing. Leaning in, I saw they wore the striped vests of hoverflies, and the white ovals were in fact, the undersides of their abdomens. They circled around the stamens, slowly checking each one with the dedication of a stockman counting goods. But they were difficult to photograph, flying on too swiftly to the next flower. I asked around but no one knew their species. When I finally had an image, iNaturalist told me they were bees: leaf-cutters, solitary bees out collecting nectar and pollen. I can find no sign of the notched leaves they cut for their beds, but someone has moved into the bee hotel. Solitary bees who forage in groups and live in dormitories. Nature does not like to be alone.
This week, I read an article about a gardener who has lost all his frogs.[i] I am grateful for our four. I found two in the stick bags, lurking beneath decaying wood among a harvest of slugs. A single amphibian in each bag, they were clearly enjoying the good life in their personal eateries. I caught them and put them in the hedge, and they hopped off quick enough, but I imagined their silent fury. Later, I watched one bask in the pond and blink a lazy-eye beneath a doily-cap of duckweed. I wondered if she recognised me. She did not move, even when I crouched down low. We regarded each other quietly and shared our secrets.
Each dawn I am woken by crows. Each day I pick a box of blackberries. There is a word I keep coming back to – singleton, the last of a species. I watch the hen blackbird strip the rowan berries one by one and I take great care to see her, really see her, before the Usutu virus that is killing her kind makes its way up the country.[ii]
Today, hornets are exploring the conifers. I never liked wasps, but it does not matter now because someone forgot to count them and they have mostly disappeared.[iii] I like hornets even less, though, and they are doing well.
Late summer has always brought mutability, an inevitability of the turning of the year, but I am not ready for this new autumn.
[i] ‘The frogs may be gone, but life goes on: how I regained my faith in gardening for wildlife’. Accessed: 04.08.2024. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/04/gardening-for-wildlife-is-it-worth-it-biodiversity-climate-pollinators
[ii] ‘Blackbird numbers plummet in south of England amid potential spread of virus’. Accessed: 03.07.2024. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/03/blackbird-numbers-plummet-in-south-of-england-amid-potential-spread-of-virus
[iii] ‘UK failing to monitor apparently falling wasp populations, expert warns’. Accessed: 07.08.2024. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/07/uk-failing-to-monitor-apparently-falling-wasp-populations-expert-warns
