Here in New York State, though most humans insist that fall only starts at the equinox or at earliest Labor Day, the other animals and plants know better.
Today for the first time this year I saw a paper wasp worker hanging around idly, meaning that her colony is done with raising babies.
The first day I said “it’s fall,” though, was on August 3, when I saw the first flowers on both spotted jewelweed and white snakeroot. By now asters are blooming and the cricket-grashopper-katydid chorus is fortissimo.
Here in Calgary, at a latitude of 50 degrees north, the northern plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Our botanical summer only lasts for 4 months: May, June, July, and August. If you understand the flowering sequences of various plants (also known as phenology), then summer is basically a countdown that begins in May, and ends in August. Every bloom, every plant going to seed, and every yellow poplar leaf is another sign of fall on that countdown!
Fall started at the beginning of August for us on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. Our falls are unpredictable but this year the pushki (cowparsnip) began dying sooner than usual. Also, the birds are starting to head South and many species I haven’t seen all summer are showing up all over, presumably coming from further North.
I have a sharp sense of various smells in natural habitats and the the physical touch of sunlight shifting throughout the year. Most people dont take notice until the changes are unavoidable but I can feel the differences week to week sometimes. This is all due to the tilting of Earth and reduced moisture in the air with chilling tempatures so anyone could sharpen these senses.
(For context I’m in NW Ohio which can be quite dynamic)
Although in the Northern Hemisphere and North America, signs here are more subtle, however I have observed the juveniles of H. sapiens beginning to amass specific resources, which they do each autumn.
I will have summer for another month and half. Unfortunate, because the outdoor temperatures are uncomfortably hot and we’d all prefer them be over! My area almost has two summers, the one with marine layer in the mornings and some plants still awake (May to sometime in July, depending on how inland you are) and then dry summer (including dreaded “fire season”) when most plants are dormant and weather is hottest (late July to early October.) Then we might have some dry fall (even more “fire season” because of thee more frequent high wind) depending on when the rain wants to start, but at least the temperatures will improve. Or rather we often bounce between tolerable and too hot in the weeks of late September and early October, whereas by mid October we can hopefully be safe…
That being said, I’ve already noticed all the bird nests I come across are empty now. So is that fall, or just spring being a distant memory? And the peak high temperature during the day occurs at an earlier time as the days get shorter.
Tree leaves are tricky for me. The majority of our trees are not native, and the deciduous ones seem to use different cues to decide when to change color or drop leaves. Some of them that must purely be using day length might color up in October, but others that might care about temperature may have colored leaves on them still in January.
Hereabouts, where winter rather than summer is the most challenging time, young birds become semi-independent of their parents by mid summer at latest, so that they have time to build up skills and strength before they either have to migrate or foraging becomes difficult.
@lmtaylor Your innocent question started a really interesting discussion about human perception!
Theoretically, we all have similar tools: a human body with relatively similar senses of smell, sight, etc. But because we have different brains, many of us perceive signs of fall in a different way: you notice bugs, some of us notice plants, Therese senses humidity, Nathan can smell fall, and he also senses the sun getting weaker on his skin . . . that’s really interesting!
PS Thank you for hitting what I call The Studer Ratio: a pyramid of doing more IDs than observations, and doing more annotations than IDs.
My true tell that fall is hear is that all the pin cherries (Prunus pennsylvanica) are turning yellow. Most keen people in northern Ontario know that theyre one of the first trees to go.
Heck, as I sit here at the Motel after work I can see the younger Birches with a couple yellow leaves each!
Here in the Southwest US, the high-elevation and higher-latitude (more northern) breeding birds start showing up at lower elevations and in places and habitats you might not expect them, indicating that the migration is underway. For birding, fall migration in my area can be almost as good as spring.
For me in Vermont this is the first sign. All of my birch trees have quite a few yellow leaves, and many of them are already on the ground. This amazes me every year, because they’ve only had leaves since May. So little time - it seems so unfair!
My favorite sign of impending fall is the increased chorus of crickets in the fields. What are they saying? “Winter is coming!”
