With mid-August upon us, it’s time to savor the last few weeks of summer, a glorious time in Georgia.
Someone once told me that if Rip Van Winkle had awakened from his 20-year slumber in August, he surely would have known what month it was because August has a look, a feel and a sound of its own. "A kind of sweet serenity now possesses the land," the late Hal Borland said of August in his book Twelve Moons of the Year.
Nearly two months past the summer solstice, the light is noticeably changing as the days grow shorter and the nights longer. Shadows lie a little differently than they did a month ago. Hay and grain fields have turned from green to a tawny brown. Many are already harvested.
In the mid-afternoon heat, cicadas, field crickets and grasshoppers serenade us with their monotonous “insect music.” Bird songs have quieted down as the feathered creatures’ wrap up their nesting seasons and many prepare to head south for the winter.
A great ripeness is spreading over the land as nature prepares a sumptuous bounty of seeds, nuts, acorns, fruits, berries and other wild food to help multitudes of insects, birds, animals and others make it through the winter to another spring.
For some creatures, late summer is a time of rebirth. In South Georgia’s swamps and wetlands, baby alligators are hatching out and may be heard "clucking" to their mothers. The young of many of Georgia’s 44 snake species -- including corn snake, Eastern racer, indigo snake (endangered), rat snake, hognose snake, plain-bellied water snake, copperhead, coral snake -- also are hatching out or being born alive now, depending on the species.
Hatching out, too, are baby pond slider turtles, eastern mud turtles and, in the sand hills, gopher tortoises.
Beginning to bloom are the gorgeous wildflowers of late summer and fall -- goldrenrods, asters, gentians, iron weed, Joe-pye weed, lobelia, Queen Anne’s lace, blazing star, hairy false foxglove, virgin’s bower and others. Some fall blooming orchids, including crane fly orchid and rattlesnake plantain, are popping up.
Nighthawks frequent the evening sky, scooping up insects on the wing. Orchard orioles and Louisiana water thrushes are headed south and will be mostly gone from Georgia by the end of this month. Also heading out are yellow warblers and male ruby-throated hummingbirds. The hummers are flocking now to feeders and wild blooms to fatten up for their arduous journey to winter homes in Mexico and Central America.
Coming in now to spend the winter in Georgia’s wetlands are small flocks of blue winged teal -- the first of more than 15 duck species that will spend the season with us.
In the sky: The moon is full tonight -- the "Fruit Moon," as the Cherokee people called August's full moon, said David Dundee, astronomer with Tellus Science Museum. Mars is low in the east about three hours before sunrise. Jupiter rises out of the east before midnight. Saturn is low in the west at dark and sets in the west before midnight. Although the Perseid meteor shower has peaked, it will still be visible through Monday night. Look to the southeast from 2 a.m. until dawn.
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