Autumn Closing In

Nights are getting crisp, days are filled with changing colors as the trees suck the nutrients back out of their leaves and begin to shut down. Winter’s coming on. We tend to think of autumn and spring as transition periods between the absolutes of heat and ice—parts of the pendulum swing before it hits the top or bottom. In reality, they are seasons of their own with their own milestones, their own comings and goings. Autumn and spring are more subtle, more nuanced than the exuberances of summer or winter’s bleakness. Pat says the autumns in Colorado are blazing with the bright yellow of aspens but lack the reds and oranges that make the East coast a leaf-peeper's Mecca.


If you pay enough attention, you can find the hallmarks of any season. Spring has its massed wildflower displays of ephemeral beauty, autumn, its own flowers and leaves. But here and there, you can still see summer’s children in a final curtain call before the cold stops the show.

A common spreadwing damselfly settles onto a perch, well below the level of the stiff breeze gusting above the tops of the cattails. Clear gossamer wings neither folded over its back nor spread stiffly out, you can almost hear the rustle of crinolines as it adjusts. Weak fliers, keeping out of the greater sky, damselflies prefer to hunt low, gleaning aphids and tiny bugs from leaves.


Autumn Meadow hawks, the last dragonflies of the year, sway in the breeze perched atop cattail leaves, alone or in coupled pairs, glowing red in the thin sunlight.


Orange and black flashes overhead give away migrating Monarch butterflies, riding the winds, looking barely in control as they flutter their way toward Mexico and the groves of fir trees where they will spend their winter.

Other sets of orange and black, a bit smaller, a bit redder give away the monarch’s mimics and doppelgangers, the viceroy butterflies. Viceroys take advantaged of the monarch’s retchingly bad taste to gain immunity from predators. They are often one of the last butterflies on the wing, first letting the monarchs pass by to teach birds not to eat anything orange. Orange isn’t just for breakfast. Trust me on this.

Autumn rains have called forth red-backed salamanders. Leaving their flooded underground lairs, they climb up tree trunks, bushes, and even walls to find some breathing space. Lungless and respiring through damp skin, they are almost never seen during the hot days of summer. The dampness of fall is the perfect time to see them. Coming in one of three flavors, the common redback with its dull red stripe running down its back, intermingles with the less common “leadback” whose red has been replaced with dull gray. A third form, more common elsewhere, is bright orange, mimicking red efts. An unrelated species, the red eft is the juvenile of the eastern newt. Newts live in beaver ponds and when the population reaches critical mass, efts leave in search of new horizons. Trudging across the forest floor, the bright orange efts tell predators to stay away—they are mildly toxic and will sicken anything foolish enough to eat one.

Red-headed woodpeckers work the dead snags at the edges of the beaver pond. White oaks, killed by the rising pond, the wood is rotted and punky enough for a wide variety of insect prey and soft enough for the woodpeckers to hammer in acorns and hickory nuts for future dining. Red-heads are one of the few woodpeckers in North America who store food for winter. Mice, flying squirrels, and gray squirrels do the same and are not above raiding the woodpecker’s pantry when times get lean.

This year, times will be good for all—it’s a mast year for oaks and other nut-bearing trees. Acorns litter the forest floor in abundance—more than enough for the hoarders to gather and bury. Oaks will belch forth a huge crop of acorns every so often and gray squirrels will gather them up and bury a few at a time in scatter hordes. Squirrels forget some spots or are detained by predators. The acorns, having been obligingly planted and away from other species with a taste for nuts, sprout to grow into new forests. Squirrels have spent thousands of years selecting the fattest and tastiest acorns to store, while oaks have spent the same time selecting squirrels to act as gardeners. Who has domesticated who?