Wild Georgia: There is beauty in November, too

Now we have November, when the evenings grow darker and the mornings frostier. After Sunday, when we set our clocks back an hour, darkness will descend -- by our clocks, at least -- an hour earlier each evening. Dinnertime will be well after sunset and evening strolls will be done under streetlights.

Several celebrated poets and writers have called November the bleakest month. “November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her novel "Little Women."

Perhaps it‘s because of the shorter days and changing daylight, when the rays of the sun become more slanted and the sun rises and sets more toward the south each day -- sure signs of an approaching winter. Nevertheless, I find beauty and much to enjoy in November, as I do in any month of the year. Here are some of the wild happenings we can expect this month:

• High-flying sandhill cranes, awe-inspiring sights, will be seen and heard flying in V-formations over metro Atlanta and other areas as they head south for the winter. Some will spend the cold season in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp.

• Other winter birds -- kinglets, cedar waxwings, yellow-rumped warblers, pine siskins, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and several species of sparrows and ducks -- will be arriving. They nested in the Northeast and Midwest during spring and summer and will spend the winter in Georgia.

• Downy, hairy, red-bellied and red-headed woodpeckers will be coming to suet feeders.

• Bald eagles will start breeding. Many of them are already working on their ponderous nests in preparation for rearing babies.

• The white-tailed deer's rutting, or breeding, season will be at full tilt. Be on extra lookout for deer running across highways.

• Endangered right whales will be arriving to spend the winter off Georgia's coast and give birth to their calves. The whale is Georgia's official state marine mammal.

• Black bears will busily fatten up on acorns and other fall food to survive the cold season ahead. When it turns very cold, the animals will retire to their dens and become dormant, but not truly hibernate, for they can easily be aroused from this dormancy. A dormant bear has decreased heart and breathing rates, but its body temperature declines very little.

• In South Georgia wetlands, ornate chorus frogs will start calling as their breeding season commences. Females will start attaching clumps of 10 to 100 eggs to vegetation in shallow ponds.

In the sky: The moon will be full Thursday, rising out of the east about sunset and setting in the west about sunrise, said David Dundee, an astronomer with the Tellus Science Museum. The Cherokee peoples called November's full moon the "Trading Moon," perhaps because it was the time for last-minute trades to obtain supplies for the winter. Another name was the "Beaver Moon" because beaver pelts are at their prime in November.