Eye on Nature
Trees around campus reveal fall colors as cool weather set in.
October reaches her gloved hand across the landscape and with a midas touch decorates the world. It is a season of ambivalence –warm sun one morning, cold rain by afternoon, winds changing direction as the climate shifts to follow sun. And while the winds take birds south, seeds to new beginnings, and speed the gait of naked apes, the gentle rains soak deeply into earth, restarting cycles stopped by summer’s heat.
A month of light and dark, warm and cold, rain and sun. Fitting that it is the season that awakens dwellers of the hybrid world. Cricket frogs have found their voice again and their caudal cousins move from burrowed hide-aways toward expanding pools to begin their breeding dance.
Such a world calls to mind analogies with the daily passage of light through dusk, gradual differences until definitive change of state. And although the transitions may be gentle, the progression is always there. Not as dramatic as spring, subdued and muted by darkness and rain, but there, to see and feel.
Wally Shriner is an MHCC biology instructor and the Natural Resources Technology program faculty adviser. Eye on Nature is his monthly column.
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