Fading Summer

Scrub jay on sentry duty

Autumn is my favorite season.  I look forward to it by about the halfway point of July.  Our summers are the most unstable when it comes to weather.  Followed by spring, which is my least favorite season.  Our springs are cold, rainy, snowy, icey, generally gross. In fact I think I've complained about it here before. 

I couldn't find any pictures of spring

 Our summers are a confusing mix of incredibly dry and hot, usually around the end of June into July and monsoonal rains in July and August.  I would point out last summer as the quintessence of this.  The Black Forest fire burned in June and Woodland Park was completely isolated by floods in August.  This summer has been more rain soaked than normal. The benefit is that there were no fires and the downside being that if you didn't get up and going before dawn you'd loose your chance to do anything out of doors.  Lucky for us working folks.  Some weeks the rain was so fierce that you couldn't go out at any time.  For the pacific northwest this might not be a probably but here in the arid southwest it's a concern.  The rain deteriorates our sandstone monoliths, like the ones at Garden of the Gods and Red Rocks Canyon.  It also drives our birds away into hiding to stay dry.  Our migration pattern has been really strange this year.  Our big birds, the jays, magpies, and hawks have all returned from their higher elevation retreats.  I saw Gray Jay last week in Divide, rare outside of deepest winter.  And our trees have only now begun to show signs of the season change.

  Colorado in general is renowned for its pine forests, the pine beetle infestation in the White River National Forest made national news.  Our most famous conifer, of which pines belong, would have to be the Colorado Blue Spruce, a high altitude, short needled tree that cloaks our high mountains.  We also have luscious firs, and the largest pinyon-juniper forests in the country.   And our aspens are also world known, we have an entire town named after them.  These trees are deciduous, meaning that they shed their leaves every year and enter a state of torpor in the cold season.  In addition to these trees we have numerous underrated deciduous trees and shrubs interspersed throughout the pine and aspen forests.  Brown papery Birch, wispy white willow, leafy berry producing dogwood and boxwood, oaks, and a few maple; though these are the silver maple type instead of the far northern red maple, and more types of roses than you can count.  Our rivers, streams, and creeks are hidden behind screens of ancient, huge cottonwoods and ashes.

  These are the trees that provide the colourful backdrop to fall.  Peak leaf watching season is about now, usually.  halfway through September and into October.  The change starts at higher elevations and works its way down the eastern slope of Pikes Peak into the heart of the city and then out towards the eastern plains.  The fiery display is under lit by the dying grasses in the plains.  The trees in the mountains do not allow much sunlight to penetrate into the forest floor and so you get a different sort of show there.  The darkness of the canopy sets the reds and oranges of the lower growing trees and shrubs into a more substantial contrast.  In the Aspen groves, some of which are miles wide, a third show takes place.  The groves in the Sangre De Cristo range are a prime example,  the colour is so overwhelming that after a few miles you have to tune it out.  One of my favorite places to view the aspen groves changing though is in Lost Creek SWA, you can climb up the Dome Rock and watch the forest from above, it's a little easier to keep your senses that way.  The hike back down to the campsites is usually enough to satisfy ones urge to walk through the aspens anyway.  As an aside- aspens are actually really gross trees.  A grove is usually one organism.  The main root system sends up multiple trunks, these are usually controlled in more populated places like your backyard but rarely so in the wild.  They also produce a toxin in their leaves that kills any pine trees that may have taken seed that year.  Lodge pole and ponderosa are the aspens most hated nemesis.  Both grow taller and soak up the sun.  Lodge poles grow very quickly while ponderosa grow very wide, and send there roots out both deep and wide, two effective ways of edging out the aspen.  They grow another toxin in their bark that kills some burrowing birds and bugs.  The skin of the aspen is believed to cure headaches, I've seen quite a few people try it but they usually got tremendously sick or it had no effect.  I would suggest to avoid eating aspen skin.  Just observe them and remember that they are slowly poisoning and killing everything around them.  During the summer most of our resident big birds head for higher ground.  While you can always see eastern, stellars, scrub, and pinyon jays, magpies, and goshawk throughout the year less of them can be seen in the hot months.

Black Billed Magpie, the only song bird whose tail is longer than its body

   Smaller accipters; coopers and sharpies, are very active during these months and most of them, but not all, will retreat southward in the next month or so.  Buteo hawks, except red tailed hawks, are migratory and I've seen a few moving through town or over some of the ridges on the west side.  The magpies and scrub jays, being the boldest, arrived quite noisily, their nasal calls filling the neighborhood and forests with enough vigor to drown out even the chickadees, another resident that is returning to the lower elevations in droves.

Scrub Jay at my feeder hoping for peanuts

   Some of our other residents, purple finches, lark bunting, and goldfinch have finished their molt and are back in their drab colours, preparing to eek out a living in the warmest places they can find, deep forest or open desert.  The oaks are dropping their acorns which all three squirrel species are busily gathering up what they can.  The birds mostly avoid them, too much work.  Soon we'll be seeing brilliantly coloured cedar waxwings, juniper tits, loons (yes! loons!) and other winter specialists.  I doubt there is another place where in a single year you can see roadrunner, pinyon jay, bald eagle, and goshawk.