Summer's End

I feel sure the hummingbirds were gone by the end of August last summer. But here we are, getting close to the Autumnal Equinox, September 23^rd, and two of them are hurriedly feeding at the annuals we set out for them in May.

If you thought likewise in the spring about purchasing hummingbird-friendly plants, then you are probably sensitive to their need to bulk up body weight by twenty-five to forty percent before the arduous journey back to Central America. 

I have been thinking about that. Most days, I am about two hundred pounds. Were I required to achieve similar weight gains over the four months of late spring and summer before walking to Mexico for the winter, I would have to tip the scales at between two-fifty, and two-eighty, which would be a chore. I would need to spend all day eating, as the hummingbirds do, who forage between fifteen hundred stops. I would require, really, only one stop: the couch, with large sandwiches and ice cream.

The particular plants over which the hummingbirds hover have trumpet-shaped red flowers, and they are growing thin and tired. They can’t do the job of nourishing the birds much longer, whose little heart rates will rise to over twelve hundred beats a minute, and wings flap fifteen to eighty times per second en route south. 

I think it must be the rain in July that has pinned them down. Not simply the amount of rain but the fact it fell in torrents. 

There is also the question of the bats. I watched them against the blue-gray twilight sky last night while grilling chicken and wondered how they were doing ahead of departure time. They must have been similarly impacted by the wet weather and difficult flying conditions. I was struck by how high up a few of them were flying, at least three or four stories above. They seemed to be working in layers. Someone may know the answer. Do they organize into flight patterns that way? A few flitted overhead, within range of a tennis racket, others circled several yards farther up, while the rest looped in acrobatic fashion near the top of white pines. What was up that high? The mosquito action was down low, where I was standing, which was as near to the grill as possible to discourage the little blood suckers. 

At the end of a summer with a month of record rainfall, the feasting is good for bats. But it is the end of the summer. We have already had cool nights needing extra blankets. It has been warm since, but the clock is ticking. The bats may need more time to bulk up before hibernation. 

In other news of things that must, by necessity, get done in the summer despite the weather, the local high school parking lot project appears to have been completed in the nick of time. Mountains of sand and asphalt managed to get rolled into a level, hard surface in time for the buses to arrive despite tropical rains. From the outside, it looked like a squeaker. But driving past the lot a couple of weeks ago suddenly it was full, my cue that the new school year had begun.

Back to school always sneaks up on me. I am still not used to the fact it comes before Labor Day, which had for decades signaled the official end of summer--nor am I happy about it. I recall Labor Day picnics, parades, swim races, farewells to summer romances, new shoes, traffic stretching for miles at New England toll booths, all of it emblematic of migration. A symphony of movement we made with other species. All of us getting organized, ready to travel, changing plumage, closing up camp.

Who reinvented back to school for us in New England, taking up the Labor Day finish line by loading in a few days of school in August? The end of summer here—short as it is—deserves a decent pagan festival heralding the harvest and celebrating the work that went into it, literally and metaphorically. Nowadays, the end of summer coasts to a stop, short of an official finish line, making it hardly worth getting off the couch to fetch a sandwich.

Published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, September 12, 2023