And the summer became the fall...

...I was not ready for the winter.

As I mulled over this Stevie Nicks lyric from her song Nightbird, which exactly describes how I felt today, I remembered a Mutts comic strip I read earlier in the week that paints autumn in a far more joyful light.  It quoted Camus:

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

Just as the blush arrives on a peony bud about to open in the spring, so the glow of fire appears along the tops of maple trees as the nights grow cooler and sunlight slowly dwindles in amount and intensity.

The mimosa trees on the streets of Newark are fast becoming burnished in the same gold that accompanies blooming sunflowers in July.

The burning bush in front of my chiropractor's office, that horridly invasive but most resplendent denizen of the fall, had a smattering of intensely red leaves this week, with hundreds more to come.

My parents' pin oak, which my dad and I planted in the early 80s, will have nothing to do with the pageantry; it will go kicking and screaming spitefully with dead brown leaves hanging limply from its branches - and even that will be late in the season.

Clearly, my trepidation over the coming of winter (no pun intended, Game of Thrones) can wait several more weeks.  Point to Camus.

Live from Stokes State Forest

We spent Sunday in Stokes State Forest surveying three more small trails for the NY-NJ Trail Conference's Invasives Strike Force.  It was a nice surprise to see how little those trails were invaded, although we did see our first clump of purple loosestrife (trust me, it's evil).  The forest always has little gifts to give you each visit, so we took pictures of the ones we could catch.  I didn't dare go for the camera when a little ovenbird crossed the trail just a few feet in front of me for fear of scaring it, but that was my enduring image for the day.  

While walking around Stony Lake Trail, we noticed two stressed trees - as evidenced by their too-early fall foliage - by the lakeside.  A closer look revealed the source of the stress - beaver chew!

 While surveying for invasives, one spends a lot of time looking at ground level.  I happened to glance upwards when we stopped to mark a GPS point and was rewarded by a very well constructed wasp's nest.  I could tell that I was on Hunger Games overload when the first thing that came to mind was "tracker jackers!"

 These orange flowers were everywhere, and we didn't know what they were.  After some time with Newcomb's Wildflower Guide, we determined it to be spotted touch-me-not (or jewelweed).  It makes sense, since jewelweed is supposed to be an antidote to poison ivy, and I remember hearing on Dual Survival that they often grow near one another.  Please note that Japanese stiltgrass is SO invasive that it even photobombed this picture; it's the leaf with the silver stripe down the middle to the left of the flower.