And so, it seems, do our readers - even in the postscripts to their letters to the editor.
Thus these final thoughts from a note about nature’s yearly happenings by Joan Cuplin of Missoula:
These are difficult days in the decidedly unnatural worlds of government and finance and other things human-made. But in nature, we can and most assuredly will find optimism - and sustenance - in the year that begins on this cold and snowy day of Jan. 1, 2009.
Many thanks to the readers who shared their favorite “dates” from nature’s calendar. They’re among the offerings below. Best of all, this is just a starter list - and therein lies our optimism.
Nature’s year is comforting for the expectations it reliably fulfills. But its wonder lies in the unexpected.
January
On a sunny day in January (how optimistic is that!), look for snow fleas. Up on Evaro Hill, Jeanne Worthy knows springtails (a considerably nicer name than fleas) by the “pepper” they sprinkle across the snow.
One of our most ancient of species, at 400 million years old, snow fleas measure one-sixteenth of an inch in size and eat leaf litter and debris. They’re around all year, Worthy assures, but are most noticeable on “warmish” winter days.
Snow is the most necessary aide in this nature quest, revealing the tiny black fleas against its whiteness. And since January is our snowiest month (with average snowfalls of 12 inches and more in western Montana’s valleys), this is the month for springtail hunting.
And at night? Worthy searches the skies, where the Big Dipper stands on its handle in the northeast, right about 8 o’clock. The Little Dipper, by the way, is best seen at nightfall, hanging straight down from the North Star.
We remember, too, this month the late Dave Friend, University of Montana astronomer and teacher of many. In winter, he advised, look for Orion’s belt, shining through the clearest, coldest nights.
The constellation named for the mythic hunter reveals itself with this pattern: Two stars form Orion’s shoulders, another three form his belt, two more his knees. No other constellation has so many bright stars: seven of either the first or second magnitude.
Look due south, halfway up the sky.
February
When we see snowfall, the Eskimos of northeastern Alaska’s Kobuk Valley see annui. We see great heaps of wind-drifted snow; the Kobuk see kimoagruk.
Siqoq is the snow that swirls like smoke above mountaintops. Siqoqtoaq is sun crust, api is freshly fallen snow at daybreak.
The loveliest telling of the Kobuk’s snow language is that of Terry Tempest Williams and Ted Major in “The Secret Language of Snow.” Each Kobuk snow word (and there are more than 50) tells a story - and reads like a poem.
Online at www.weathernotebook.org, you can hear Doris Anderson, an Inupiaq from the Kobuk River village of Shungnak, pronounce the Native words for snow on ground, drift blocking a trail, deep enough for snowshoes, windblown bare spots, sugar snow, and space between a drift and obstruction.
March
Come the first week of March, you’ll find Montana’s state butterfly flitting about in still-snowy woods.
Mourning cloaks are found in all of our 56 counties, and in every sort of setting. On rocky walls in Hellgate Canyon. In a barn, asleep on a bale of hay. Atop a winter-killed mule deer. On the back fence.
“It is such a beauty,” says Jean Thomas, the Stevensville woman and Montana Federation of Garden Clubs officer who championed the species’ designation at the 2001 Legislature.
And such a sweet harbinger of the season’s change. March is the month to search for, make note of and pay homage to each new and increasingly voluptuous sign of spring: sagebrush buttercups at Fort Missoula, a chickadee calling, aspen leaves opening in the backyard grove, starlings on the tips of old-growth cottonwoods, chives pushing through the mud, postal carriers in Bermuda shorts.
We make it official on Friday, March 20 - the vernal equinox, when daylight and dark are equally apportioned.
April
Nature babies are spring’s most optimistic occupants. At the National Bison Range in Moiese, Pat Jamieson says to watch for bison calves beginning in mid-April.
And then come the wildflowers. Atop Evaro Hill, the Worthys say mid-April is the time for spring beauties (Claytonia lanceolata), trillium (Trillium ovatum) and glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum). Here at the Missoulian, our own news editor, Justin Grigg, begins another year of his popular Wildflower Walks columns.
And mark this date: Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - when the great eco-celebration turns 30!
Hike to the “M” on Missoula’s Mount Sentinel this Earth Day and tell someone its story. Decried as a “communist plot,” Earth Day was originally christened The National Environmental Teach-in. Its date was selected by then-Sen. Gaylord Nelson - not to coincide with Lenin’s birthday (which it does), but to coincide with spring vacations and avoid college exams. Twenty-million people participated in Earth Day One, including several dozen University of Montana students who hiked to the “M” for a “Sermon on the Mount” by ecology professor Clancy Gordon.
The nighttime sky beckons with ancient spectacles.
May
Then comes the explosion of May: tulips blooming on the east side of Missoula City Hall, pasqueflowers on Blue Mountain, fairybells in Greenough Park, shooting stars and calypso orchids on Evaro Hill, Palouse Prairie wildflowers on the Bison Range.
This May, pay homage to Missoula County’s newest conservation easement when the camas blooms in a “lake” atop Evaro. Bob Hayes just signed the papers with the county this past month, promising to forever tend his 177 acres. Enjoy the bloom anew, then write Hayes a thank-you note. His is a great gift of stillness in our lives’ perpetual storms. The camas, you see, bloom alongside U.S. Highway 93.
And while you’re at it, drop a note to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks when the state celebrates the opening of general stream fishing season on the third Saturday in May. Ours are waters filled with a bounty of fishable trout thanks to the care and nurturing of the fine folks at FWP.
June
Who doesn’t feel happier as western Montana careens toward the longest day of the year each June? All those “extra hours” after work! The return of sunset-watching to the Higgins Avenue Bridge! High school graduations! The first lazy days of summer vacation!
Bitterroots, our state flower, begin blooming this month on the National Bison Range and on sunny slopes throughout western Montana. The timing varies greatly, though, so you’ll need to do a bit of sleuthing. At the Bison Range, Jamieson advises a call to her office - (406) 644-2211 - before you make the drive.
Last June, the Missoulian’s intrepid wildflower walker found bitterroots abloom on Waterworks Hill and Pengelly Ridge on Mount Sentinel. He advised looking in the rocky, dry soil of valleys, foothills and mountains - anytime from late April to July.
We love bitterroots for their mixture of delicacy and sturdiness. These pretty little flowers withstand brutal winters (have you seen the wind and snow cascading across Waterworks Hill in recent weeks?), then bloom amid rocks and gravel on the driest of slopes in summer. And that makes bitterroots, we think, the perfect symbol of our sturdy but ever-beauteous state.
July
Summer? Western Montana? This is it, and it is not a thing to be wasted. July, we proclaim, is the month of empty newsrooms!
July is for picking berries, swatting hornets, sleeping under the stars, hiking for miles and miles and hollering to all resident grizzly bears (as in, “Whoa bear!”).
We like the trails of Glacier National Park in July (and early August, too). Elizabeth Lake and the Ptarmigan Tunnel. The surprise of Belly River Ranger Station. The roar of the many waterfalls along the trail. The mandatory “shower” along the trail to Grinnell Glacier. Snapping the yearly family photo at Avalanche Lake and Grinnell Glacier, to see who’s grown larger and who’s a bit smaller - the glaciers, sadly, included. We love listening to the after-dinner stories around the table at Granite Park Chalet. And watching the grizzlies feeding on beargrass in the distance.
Most of all, we like adding to the list of all that we enjoy doing in July in western Montana.
August
And while you’re out in the backcountry, watch for the Perseid meteor shower, the grandest such show of the year and a highlight of August in these climes. On the darkest night of the month, look for the constellation Sagittarius. It marks the way to the center of the galaxy.
One of our best-ever August outings was a night spent in the West Fork Butte fire lookout, way up and off U.S. Highway 12, overlooking the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and Idaho. A trundling black bear greeted us on the trail, plump from snacking on the huckleberry bushes that surround the lookout. Our little dog saw the bear and promptly barfed. (That’s right - barfed, not barked!) We gave the bear plenty of clearance, and later had our own huckleberry feast.
And then came the best part of the day: a sunset that lingered long past all expectations, lighting up range after range of mountains - 11 by one count - counseling us all in the grace that enfolds our lives year upon year, grace upon grace.
September
Ah! The month when the season’s change is announced first with a smell, early in the day, sharp and crisp and clear. Summer is fading, autumn approaches.
Then come the sounds: elk bugling in early morning and evening, children chattering at the bus stop, the roar from Washington-Grizzly Stadium on home-game Saturday afternoons. The Nez Perce called this month Pe-Khun-Mai-Kahl, when fish migrate downstream to wintering pools and salmon fingerlings travel to the ocean.
Missoula’s Joan Cuplin calls this, and all of fall, a miracle. “I love to see the leaves change color, and I press them in books,” she says. “I love to rake them up, jump in the pile, smell them and wade through them and wear them as a crown.”
On Evaro Hill, the Worthy family watches for the emergence of the year’s “strongest” mushroom: Coprinus comatus, the shaggy mane, which pushes through hard, dry dirt - “even asphalt!” says Jeanne.
In the sky above, they watch the Little Dipper pouring into the Big Dipper, sharing summer’s last drops of starlight.
And on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, it is official. Summer is past. Our most nostalgic - and, we hope, lingering - of seasons has arrived.
October
Migration makes maniacs of many as the days grow colder, so why not join the party by taking a drive across Rogers Pass to the Rocky Mountain Front? Freezeout Lake is October’s ode to abundance, as tens of thousands of snow geese and tundra swans stretch the season on the last vestiges of open water. Their liftoffs and landings fill the camera lens and the senses, defying would-be accountants and naysayers alike.
Our favorites, though, are the shorebirds skittering along the water’s edge, tiptoeing through the last warm days. We like the sound of their names nearly as much as we admire their long legs and almost-as-long bills: American avocets, killdeer, snipes, phalaropes, marbled godwits and black-necked stilts and whimbrels. Hurrah for the whimbrels!
And three cheers for the surprise migrants that sometimes veer off course and through our valley! One October, a mockingbird was spied in Missoula.
November
Migration? Check.
Hibernation? Check.
If you didn’t fly south, you’d best set about finding a warm place to winter over. Maybe even a place to just hunker down and snooze.
This time of year, UM professor Kerry Foresman devotes two weeks of class time to hibernation - that is, the study of hibernation.
“Most people,” he says, “don’t understand what animals are doing when they hibernate. They don’t just fall asleep, then wake up in spring.”
Hibernation is an attempt to stretch a year’s supply of food - one box of cereal, if you will - for 12 whole months. Animals eat the cereal during the summer and fall. And the box in winter.
So say goodbye this November to the chipmunks, woodchucks, woolly bear caterpillars, painted turtles, marmots and other true hibernators of western Montana. Darkness overwhelms the daylight now and cold soaks into the soil. The time has come to conserve calories, lest the box not last until spring.
December
We like “shopping” for Christmas cards on the annual Audubon Society Christmas bird count. Chapters of the birdwatching conservationists gather each December to count all the birds they see and hear in a single outing.
One December, 6,000 red-winged blackbirds took flight over Mullan Road west of Missoula just as the Auduboners approached. Then came a raven without a tail, all wings and darkness. Then a courting pair of white-breasted nuthatches, climbing head-first down a tree trunk. Looking for love? Or insects? No one seemed to care.
This, too, is the month with the most optimistic night of the year. Missoula’s late, great naturalist Kim Williams - who inspired this calendar many years ago - once proclaimed the winter solstice and its longest night nature’s most hopeful sign. “The world,” she shouted, “is heading toward light!”
And so we follow her lead into another year of natural wonders, knowing there will be comfort in the seasons’ changing and a surprise around every corner.
Editor Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5250 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)